The health benefits of virtualization
BY NETAPP
NHS Bolton and Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative have been able to centralize and consolidate their server and storage requirements thanks to virtualization implementations, with attendant, significant cost savings.
NHS Bolton was established in 2002 as an organisation dedicated to ensuring that the best possible healthcare is provided for patients in the Bolton region. Employing more than 1,800 staff, NHS Bolton includes 17 health centres, 56 GP practices, 36 dental practices, 35 opticians and 66 community pharmacies. In addition, there are a large number of specialist community services ranging from speech and language therapy, district and school nursing services, occupational therapy, minor surgery and urgent care services including rapid response teams and a GP out-of-hours service. (
www.bolton.nhs.uk)
Technology is a vital tool in ensuring that the NHS is able to provide safe, effective and efficient services to all its patients. Historically, within NHS Bolton, servers and storage were kept locally at GP surgeries, health centres and clinics, with patient and administrative data scattered across the region and being looked after in an ad hoc manner. As part of its on-going IT development, the Trust decided to look at the benefits of centralising the server and storage requirements in order to cope with the anticipated future growth and provide added security and resilience for its increasing amounts of data. “With local
systems running out of disk space and data held all over the borough it was difficult to look after,” says Scott Willis, IT Manager at NHS Bolton.
The Trust relies heavily on email as a major communication tool with over 3,500 email messages being sent and 4,500 delivered each day, so the ability to manage, store and retrieve email correspondence was a key concern when choosing a storage system. “We looked at several options,” says Willis. “They either couldn’t offer us the flexibility we needed, or were outside our budget.” Some of the solutions were built specifically around email storage and didn’t have the breadth of functionality to support all the different types of data storage required by the Trust. Robustness, reliability and scalability were all part of the specification for a centralized storage solution.
The solution
NHS Bolton opted for two NetApp FAS storage arrays to house the virtualized environment – one for its primary data centre and one for its disaster recovery facility. “The primary NetApp storage array provides centralised data storage facilities while
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