Owned by the Vatican State, Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù (OPBG) is a 607-bed public hospital and training/ research center in Rome, Italy. As a leading European pediatric hospital, OPBG employs almost 2,600 people, including physicians, researchers, nurses, clinical technicians, and office staff. The organization provides over 1.5 million treatments each year to children and adolescents from all over the world.
As OPBG works through a multi-year program to modernize the systems that support clinical and administrative functions, its strategic aims are to improve the performance and reliability of information systems. The IT organization is also building up its ability to support cloud native workloads, for both internal and third-party applications.
At-a-Glance
As a leading hospital based in Italy, OPBG is stepping into a new era of data-driven patient care. With Rancher Prime as its strategic platform for managing containers with Kubernetes, the organization benefits from a stable, user-friendly solution backed by expert support from SUSE. Having completed the migration of its document management system to SUSE Rancher Prime, OPBG is now moving its most significant core services.
The journey to containerization
The Core Services at OPBG support a broad range of clinical and administrative activities and are at the heart of enabling the hospital to provide high-quality care to patients. Core Services includes in-house and third-party software elements, and its microservicesbased components are frequently upgraded and extended. This flux made containerization an attractive option for OPBG, which wanted to ensure that changes to one part of Core Services would not impact other running services. Adopting containerization would also make it easier to scale services up and down in response to changing patterns of demand, as well as simplifying management and maintenance.
As the first step, OPBG decided to run the containerized version of its document management software (Documentum) on Kubernetes, as a way to build up skills for the more complex task of containerizing Core Services and other systems such as patient records.
Andrea Proietti, IT services manager at OPBG, says, “We chose Kubernetes for its flexibility, intuitiveness and ability to create multiple different containerized landscapes all managed from the same place. The fact that it is an open source solution was also appealing, because this means that you have a whole community of people identifying and fixing potential bugs.”
“Rancher Prime gives us support through every part of the Kubernetes lifecycle. Moreover, the solution makes it easy to split out our application environments, so that we can isolate elements such as IT security and manage them separately.”
Why Rancher Prime?
OPBG reviewed the market for Kubernetes management platforms and concluded that Rancher offered a unique combination of advanced features and openness.
As a proof-of-concept exercise, OPBG initially deployed the community version of Rancher. The organization then decided to adopt enterprise support with Rancher Prime to ensure that it could maintain and manage multiple mission-critical Kubernetes clusters. OPBG’s Kubernetes environment runs on-premises on Dell PowerEdge and HPE SimpliVity servers.
“Rancher Prime gives us support through every part of the Kubernetes lifecycle. Moreover, the solution makes it easy to split out our application environments, so that we can isolate elements such as IT security and manage them separately,” says Flavio Poletti, IT security manager at OPBG.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Making a fast start
Using Rancher Prime helped OPBG to make a fast start with Kubernetes, gaining the skills to deploy Documentum successfully into production and start the more complex project to migrate its Core Services. Both for the initial adoption and ongoing operation of Rancher Prime, SUSE has assisted with training and active support.
“As a hospital, we need to ensure the highest possible levels of reliability and performance for our systems,” says Poletti. “Rancher Prime made it easier to bring our internal teams up to speed in the use of Kubernetes, and the helpful support from SUSE meant that there were no surprises at the implementation stage.”
Efficient Kubernetes operations
For the operational team at OPBG, Rancher Prime offers flexibility, ease-of-use and a uniform approach to managing Kubernetes clusters. These qualities help the relatively small team to work efficiently and ensure high quality of service to users.
“With Rancher Prime, we can easily manage the full Kubernetes cluster lifecycle and keep on top of updates,” says Proietti. “Security updates and version upgrades are fast and almost totally automated, so we can spend less time managing the platform and more time thinking about services.”
Creating new value
With Rancher Prime as its Kubernetes management platform, OPBG is continuing to modernize its services on firm foundations. The platform’s reliability and high degree of automation enable the organization to focus on strategic objectives rather than on low-level infrastructure.
“We are still at the early stages of our Kubernetes journey, but already we can see that Rancher Prime is helping us to create new value for staff and patients through greater reliability, faster operations and seamless management of different projects,” says Proietti.
What’s next for OPBG?
The full migration of OPBG’s Core Services to Kubernetes is likely to take several years, because this will require changes to both internal and third-party software. In the meantime, the organization will continue to work closely with SUSE to build up its Kubernetes skills and accelerate its modernization program.
“Our collaboration with SUSE is going very well and we appreciate the professionalism and responsiveness of their team,” says Proietti. “Rancher Prime is proving to be a reliable platform and we look forward to migrating more services to it.”