“The main advantage of Zentyal is that it offers us a total solution. It allows us to manage the domain & directory services, infrastructure server, network configuration and gateway from a single point of control.”
Samuel A. Gobbi, ICT Manager, Reconquista Central Hospital
When the Reconquista Central Hospital deployed Zentyal, the main goal was to centralize and make easier the management of their over 250 users. Due to the very nature of the organization, they experience a lot of movement of employees which makes it very important to have a central point for user management to free up time for other system administration tasks.
The challenge
Before deploying the Zentyal Server, the Reconquista Central Hospital already had more than 250 users that they managed without a central domain and directory server. Due to the number of users and the high staff turnover, it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage users and permissions efficiently or allow file sharing in a simple way to promote teamwork and collaboration between the staff members.
In this context, the single most important requirement for Reconquista Central Hospital was to find a solution that would allow them to easily manage user authentication and file sharing.
The solution
After having finished the test deployment, the IT Department of the Reconquista Central Hospital concluded that Zentyal Server was a feasible option for them both from a technical and economic point of view. They chose to make a clean deployment of Zentyal Server virtualized on VMware ESXi 6.5 with 2 CPUs, 12GB of RAM and the disk partitioned allocating 60GB to the operating system and 2TB to the Home directory. A standard Zentyal installation was made, without any custom configuration.
The main functionality that was sought was to incorporate all the users to a single domain as well as make file sharing easy between these users. Because the hospital was in process of moving to a new building, the deployment was carried out in phases and the services were implemented and put in production first for the sectors that needed them most urgently.
In addition to the main function of the server, the IT Department has also decided to use modules from Zentyal Gateway (Network, Firewall, IDS/IS and Proxy), Infrastructure Server (DNS and NTP), Mail server (Mail and Mail filter) and they are evaluating replacing the current DNS and Proxy solutions with Zentyal later.
The experience
For the IT Department of the Reconquista Central Hospital, the main advantage of Zentyal is that it offers a comprehensive solution that allows them to manage most of the user-related requests from a single point. This frees up a lot of time – that the IT staff previously had to dedicate to management of users and permissions on daily basis. This time can can now be used for other IT and systems management tasks of their organization.
Also from the economic point of view, the Reconquista Central Hospital staff highlights that Zentyal Server was the most feasible option for a public organization like theirs, with a limited budget and where previously they weren’t able to have a commercial solution of these characteristics in place.
About the Reconquista Central Hospital “Dra Olga Stucky de Rizzi”
The Reconquista Central Hospital “Dra Olga Stucky de Rizzi” is located in the city of Reconquista, in the north of the Argentine Republic, which is the fourth largest city in the province of Santa Fe. Reconquista has approximately 80,000 inhabitants and the Hospital Reconquista serves the entire “General Obligado” Department and a large part of the Northeast Argentina Region (NEA), being responsible for the care of about 300,000 people. The services provided by the hospital include Emergency Room Services, Outpatient Care, Diagnosis and Treatment, Maternity Services, Surgical Services and Inpatient Care.