INDUSTRY HEALTH
the mirrored facility on our second site offers us replication, disaster recovery and business continuity services,” says Willis. Email performance has significantly improved too; once the system was migrated to the NetApp solution, mailbox sizes across the Trust were automatically increased. With a vast amount of emails in any given hour coming into the Trust, users need an adequate mailbox allowance to ensure that all essential emails can be stored and retrieved easily.
Before the introduction of the NetApp system the size of each mailbox was severely restricted. Heavy email users, such as consultants and directors, have seen an immediate improvement since the installation. All users across the Trust are now benefiting from faster access to email together with better storage and retrieval capabilities.
At the same time as the NetApp storage solution was being implemented Willis and his team decided to virtualise the server environment, replacing aging servers with modern versions. “It made sense to do this in parallel with the storage implementation,” says Willis. “We now have the optimum server and storage environment to serve the needs of the Trust and our users.” The virtualisation phase of the project resulted in NHS Bolton’s physical server estate being reduced from 43 servers down to 5 physical VMware vSphere Servers. As a result, NHS Bolton has a more condensed server computer platform with the ability to perform full site failover to the DR site.
Business Benefits With its simple, but powerful interface the NetApp solution is proving to be straightforward to manage. “Once it was set up with the data in the right place, it is very easy to manage,” says Willis.
The flexibility of the NetApp solution, with its cost-effective ability to mix and match disks of varying speeds has given the Trust the performance and reliability it sought. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager allows the disaster recovery site to be checked at any time of the day without affecting the performance or availability of the main storage facility.
Management and engineering time is being saved through the ease of management of a centralised system and speed of file recovery. Previously a full time member of staff was assigned to recovering files from tape systems. “Installing a NetApp storage system has given us an immediate cost saving in IT infrastructure terms,” says Willis. “The hidden benefits are
in time savings through more efficient system administration, allowing us all to manage our time more productively and freeing up members of staff.”
Chris Russ, Assistant Director for Information Management & Technology at NHS Bolton, elaborates: “With the productivity gains we have seen so far it is clear that choosing to implement NetApp in a virtual environment was the right choice. However, the benefits do not stop there. With our virtual environment in place, supported by NetApp, we are confident that NHS Bolton can achieve further operational gains and cost efficiencies by scaling our storage to match our computing needs on an ongoing basis. In addition, having gone down the virtualisation route has opened up a clear path to introducing services on a shared service delivery model, whilst maintaining our ability to be compliant to data security standards.”
A key motivation for this project was to reduce environmental impact without jeopardising the service levels. The cost savings from this project are continually
growing, by reducing servers and therefore any support required NHS Bolton has alone already saved well over £100,000. This is set to continue increasing over the coming years.
“The installation has been so successful that most users have not noticed the move to a centralised storage and virtualised server environment. What they have noticed,” says Willis, “is that email access is faster, they no longer run out of disk space and that things just seem to work better.”
Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative Formed in 2008 as a result of reorganization within the NHS, the Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative is the shared IT service provider for NHS services including Coventry Teaching Primary Care Trust and Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership Trust. The IT Collaborative now supports over 4,000 users across the region.
Centralise and consolidate IT resources One of the first tasks for the IT Collaborative was to undertake the centralisation and consolidation of the IT resources through the creation of two data centres. “We were formed from two legacy organisations,” says Richard Newham, technical services manager at Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative. “As such we have inherited a lot of legacy equipment and infrastructure, including several cupboards with a few machines in them that need to be brought up to date and turned into a modern data centre to support the work of our clients.”
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