Issue 8, Feb/Mar 10
FOCUS MANAGEMENT UPDATE
DORSET HEALTHCARE NHS FOUNDATION TRUST ACHIEVES ENERGY SAVINGS WITH 67% SERVER CUT
Space and power issues have led Dorset Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (DHFT) – a healthcare provider on England’s south coast – to achieve tighter data center management without a full replacement by using virtualisation, allied with careful monitoring of power capacity.
Expanding the data center was not possible as the main power phase was stretched to the limit. Instead, Dorset worked with specialist healthcare IT specialist CSA Waverley to develop a new infrastructure that unlocked space, reduced power draw and provided a flexible future-proofed infrastructure.
DHFT is a specialist trust, providing mental health, learning disability, addictions, community brain injury and community dental services for a population of more than 700,000 people in eastern Dorset, and a number of services across the whole county.
The organisation operates across 30 sites and has more than 2,000 users working off 50 servers and 1,000 PCs and laptops. All its sites use individual backup mechanisms supported by an IT team of 10, which provides service, support and management functionality across all mental health services in Bournemouth and east and west Dorset.
DHFT’s data center sits on a limited spur of the local electricity network and is housed in an old Victorian building with poor energy performance. Legacy infrastructure also generated considerable amounts of heat that required large amounts of cooling, which in turn drew heavily on power. “We had critical issues with power,” says Nigel Rodgers, head of IT at the trust.
“These problems meant we were overdrawing power by 10% with inefficient servers and overburdened air conditioning that couldn’t cope. The power problem became critical in the winter months, when staff used electric fan heaters. But due to the size of the server room we couldn’t legally introduce a second phase to cope with any further technology.
“Worst-case scenarios have seen one phase blow, which put a third of the building out – including the computer room – and forced a temporary return to a paper-based office system. This is totally unacceptable, as patients sometimes found themselves in the dark. Our
data center manager community feeling stressed by their workloads and saying their sites are suffering from poor planning.
The study found that respondents believe they are facing management challenges as data center complexity increases, with more than a third of managers surveyed saying that too many applications and data center complexity are impediments to staff productivity.
electric bill was astronomical and our IT systems were far from resilient. The IT team’s mission to improve capability meant a new building, the purchase of a substation – or a technological miracle,” says Rodgers.
To combat the problems, CSA Waverley used a Novell PlateSpin PowerRecon Assessment to qualify that DHFT could consolidate its existing estate of over 50 servers, reducing power requirement and saving space.
The team developed a value-for-money plan to consolidate the trust’s Windows server estate, based on HP DL Servers, but maintained some existing HP Unix technology for flexibility.
Virtualisation became the only feasible option given the constraints of the challenge. As a result, HP blades running VMware ESX and two management blades have been introduced. The application of VMware and blade architecture has paved the way for future projects to consolidate and migrate both live and legacy Unix systems to a virtual environment.
DHFT says the consolidation work has slimmed infrastructure by 67% and saved 74% on its energy bill. “Energy has been saved by using less hardware and HP blade power management, which powers down unused capacity during low-usage periods. In turn, our air conditioning has been turned down by 5o per unit. The proliferated impact has been phenomenal. We have future-proofed the trust’s capability,” explains Rodgers.
MAJOR GLOBAL DATA CENTER STUDY UNCOVERS MANAGEMENT WOES
A major study by security stalwarts Symantec has uncovered a sizeable chunk of the global
There is also an apparent gap in planning: again, around 30% say existing data center forward strategic planning is either undocumented or needs work, with “important areas left out of the plan [such as] virtual servers, remote offices and cloud computing”.
Finally, many IT managers believe their organisations are understaffed and that many are in need of developing better and more clearly defined disaster recovery plans.
Most enterprises have 10 or more data center initiatives rated as “somewhat” or “absolutely” important, and half expect “significant” changes to their data centers in 2010. A similar proportion complain that applications are growing somewhat quickly and are finding it difficult and costly to meet service level agreements.
Adding to the complexity is the continued increase in data, causing 71% of organisations to consider data reduction technologies as a means of coping.
The data comes from the Symantec 2010 State of the Data Center report’s findings, based on November 2009 surveys of 1,780 data center managers in 26 countries (of which 573 were in EMEA). The study considers companies with fewer than 2,000 employees to be small enterprises and companies with 10,000 or more employees to be large.
Another key finding was that business drivers for IT departments, such as security, back-up and recovery and continuous data protection, remain heartland issues – ahead of virtualisation and the cloud.
ONLINE
www.symantec.com/about/news/resources/press_kits/ detail.jsp?pkid=sdcreport2010
www.datacenterdynamics.com 35
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