The decision to centralise and share IT resources was reached due to the synergy between the two organisations and the desire to benefit from greater economies of scale. “Running one slightly larger IT operation makes more sense than managing two smaller ones,” says Newham. “We’re moving from managing desktops to delivering a centralised Citrix service, meaning that we can deliver a feature-rich service to all users with the minimum number of people, giving optimum performance, best value, and a better return on investment.”
As with most public sector organisations the emphasis is on doing more with less in the current economic climate. The big drivers for IT in the health service are resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity together with cost improvements. “For the last six years our clients have wanted to implement a robust business continuity plan at both departmental and organisational levels. This requirement becomes an essential service during periods like the recent flu pandemic,” says Newham.
The focus of the IT Collaborative has been on virtualisation and investing in the creation of two data centres one in Coventry and the other sited in Nuneaton. The locations were chosen because they were the furthest apart that the authority could afford, given the cost of connectivity. With a legacy SAN system that was underperforming and running out of capacity, it was decided that a new storage solution was required. “Disk access speeds were low, performance was down, and the needs of our users were outstripping the available technology,” says Newham. “As an organisation we were struggling to deliver the level of service that we thought acceptable and our users wanted.”
While the easiest way to improve performance was to replace the existing disk drives with modern, faster ones, the IT Collaborative also had a mandate to deliver disaster recovery and business continuity facilities. Following extensive analysis of the requirements and technical integration required, a tender document was issued.
“We ended up with a short list of three viable proposals: HP, Dell, and NetApp,” says Newham. The proposed technologies were extensively reviewed and, although all systems delivered similar performance, only NetApp offered a joined-up solution with all the required functionality supplied by a single vendor. “Other systems were more difficult to manage, requiring additional training to expand our in-house technical expertise and used technologies
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from different vendors,” says Newham. ”With NetApp I have one supplier of all the technology, so I know exactly where to go if we need expert help to develop or expand the system.”
Creating a virtualised environment The NetApp proposal came from NetApp partner ANS, which had already established a working relationship with the IT Collaborative on a number of large technical installations, including redesigning the core infrastructure and implementing a large voice over IP system. “There was an added element of confidence in the proposal because we knew that ANS would deliver what it said it would,” says Newham. “One of our concerns was how the NetApp solution would fit into our existing infrastructure and carry the replication traffic. We were keen to bring both our storage and network together at every level, and ANS scored points with its end-to-end knowledge of our infrastructure.”
Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative anticipates a significant reduction in management overhead. “With any technology refresh there is always a steep learning curve,” says Newham. “This installation is also making us grow up in terms of managing the service-level requirements of our users and the criticality of each of their applications. We’ve done a lot of business impact analysis with our stakeholders, and hope to engage them in managing their ownership and responsibility for data.”
In addition to an improvement in performance, the IT Collaborative anticipates substantial efficiencies in manpower. Due to the storage inefficiencies of its previous SAN system, over half a day a week was spent changing backup tapes in the data centres. “I expect that to reduce that to a couple of hours a week. We won’t be getting rid of tape backup completely, but we do hope to reduce the frequency of tape changes due to deduplication and other efficiencies within our NetApp storage.”
Taking a virtualised approach to delivering IT has already reduced costs, and implementing a NetApp storage solution has shrunk the storage footprint together with its associated management and running costs. “The NetApp storage solution will allow us to deliver the service that our healthcare users demand, and the whole organisation should benefit from the efficiencies that we will achieve. In addition, we now know that the data is being well looked after.”
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