OBBeC.com

Armonk, N.Y. and Malvern, PA. (OBBeC) - Siemens and IBM have teamed up to help community hospitals reduce their operating costs and energy consumption.

As per the announcement, hospitals currently using or planning to use Siemens MedSeries4, a healthcare information system designed specifically for community hospitals, will also benefit from the bundling of powerful server technology from IBM that features the company’s POWER server, its energy-efficient, environmentally friendly BladeCenter Servers, Tivoli Storage Manager software, and specially configured IBM System Storage DS3000 and DS4000 IBM systems.

To ensure each hospital the widest range of health-information applications operating in a standardized environment, Siemens and IBM will consolidate MedSeries4 surround systems in a rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter Server. The BladeCenter is combined with a rack-mounted IBM DS3000 or DS4000 disk storage solution that can eliminate the need to use multiple independent server and storage combinations for individual delivery of these departmental applications.

Further, IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) works to automate data protection, reduce complexity with centralized storage management operations, and coordinate access of all data coming from the applications that reside in the BladeCenter as information flows to one common storage unit.

Finally, the entire system is backed up by IBM’s Linear Tape Option (LTO) tape storage systems.

According to initial cost analyses conducted by IBM and Siemens, the organizations project that community hospitals could cut initial hardware costs by approximately 25 percent.