The NHS IT Security Specialists
St Helens & Knowsley Health Informatics Service and HP PolyServe
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St Helens & Knowsley Health Informatics Service supports four diverse health organisations with differing healthcare requirements, Acute, PCT, GP and Mental Health services, with a user base of 10,000 individuals.
The IT infrastructure at the HIS incorporates up to 6000 laptops and PC’s, a large estate of HP Proliant Class 
servers and 2 data centres with 2 EVA Storage Area Networks that provide replication between the data centres. The HIS currently uses traditional Microsoft clustering to provide file services to the organisations that it supports.
The HIS has a proven track record of implementing best of breed solutions to constantly improve its IT infrastructure, creating increased efficiencies for its stakeholders.
The Business Challenge
Supporting such a large and complex organisation dictates that the HIS needs to continually expand its file-serving infrastructure to meet its current and future requirements. This is set within an environment where the HIS needs to make best use of existing IT investment and skills, avoiding huge investment in hardware, supporting operating systems, re-training and migration costs. The HIS needed to move beyond the limitations of Microsoft’s eight-node single-instance clustering to a fully load-balanced, highly available and scaleable solution.
Due to its rapid growth and success as a HIS, the organisation has experienced very high demands on its file service. The scale of data storage requirements and the high volume of clients connecting to those services has increased dramatically. The HIS needed a fully scalable solution to provide high fault tolerance and greater management efficiencies than traditional NAS solutions could provide.
Any alternative solutions would require a move to a UNIX file serving platform or CIFS/SMB appliance. The ease of migration from traditional Microsoft clusters to a Matrix cluster was also an issue of considerable importance for the HIS.
Ensuring that all files would be accessible by all servers, so users and applications could move easily between services, and eliminate the need to replicate data to assist in load balancing for redundancy was vital. The HIS needed flexibility in adding storage, networking and processing capacity on the fly, without disruption; whilst a high performance vs price and low total cost of ownership were also key.
The Solution
To solve this challenge the HIS, working closely with BMS, chose HPs PolyServe File Serving Utility. This software is built on a fully symmetrical cluster file system, with distributed lock manager and cache coherency, making it particularly well suited to operate where multiple people access the same data. In addition, it is designed to work with the HP servers and storage, thus ensuring easy integration and problem-free operation for the HIS.
The file serving utility provides on-the-fly scalability, for non-disruptive expansion of server and storage capacity, and requires no system downtimes for system upgrades. It simplifies administration by managing servers, storage and network from a central management point, and will deliver a highly reliable system, with integrated fail-over capabilities, to support high-volume 24/7 applications.
HP PolyServe delivers modularly, scalable performance at a fraction of the cost of proprietary storage cluster alternatives, providing:-
- High Performance – up to two gigabytes per second throughput performance for demanding workloads
- Fault Tolerant Data Access – Load balanced, fault-tolerant access to all data in the NAS cluster
- Industry Standard components – grow clusters using low cost servers and storage
- The ability to Share Data among 1000’s of Clients - scalable file services to thousands of nodes.
- Data Availability – create snapshots for rapid recovery of files on industry standard RAID systems.
- Simplified management and reduced operating costs by minimising time spent on Maintenance
The Benefits
The anticipated results of implementing the PolyServe solution are that the HIS will be able to reduce maintenance and troubleshooting time and costs, and improve overall performance. James Graham, Technical Development Engineer for the HIS said “PolyServe will allow us to significantly expand our file-serving infrastructure to meet our current and future requirements, enabling us to move beyond the limitations of Microsoft eight-node single-instance clustering to a fully load–balanced highly available and scaleable solution.
It is easily expandable with no impact on users and will provide enterprise-level services to our health economy. We believe that this is the only solution that will allow us to leverage our current investment in Windows based servers whilst complementing our HP SAN infrastructure, improve our efficiency, lower our call rate and deliver the key benefits of load balancing and highly scalable file services”.
Matt Connor, IT Developments Manager said “We have a very close history of working with BMS. We have always found the Company to be much more than an IT Sales Company. BMS provide us with an in-depth, caring service which is reassuring when we are involved in very large project work such as the PolyServe initiative. They always take the time to understand our precise needs and put everything they can into delivering a service-led rather than a sales approach.
We regard them as a leading edge supplier who add value to the work we do and that is their competitive edge”.
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