The NHS IT Security Specialists
Business Continuity Planning with an Holistic Storage and Virtualisation Solution at University Hospital South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust
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University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust (UHSM) is a major Acute Teaching Hospital Trust providing services for adults and children at Wythenshawe Hospital and Withington Community Hospital.
Recognised as a centre of clinical excellence, and acknowledged as one of the top performing Trusts in the UK by the Healthcare Commission, it provides district general hospital services and specialist tertiary services to patients across the North West and beyond.
The Trust is highly dependent on IT to support all of its business and clinical functions and in its drive to meet the challenges of ensuring continuous operational delivery of healthcare services the Trust is very keen to implement IT solutions which make its operations and business more efficient. The priority for the Trust is to provide optimum performance and resilience from their applications enabling Trust staff to best serve patients.
Ray Burdge, IT Infrastructure Manager at UHSM said, “We are very keen to ensure business continuity is at the heart of our IT strategy and it is imperative that we create a new IT environment to meet increasing demands. BMS, who we have worked with successfully on previous occasions, have assisted us in sourcing a new infrastructure solution which is at the leading-edge of technology advances and which will provide us with a secure and resilient platform to consolidate our storage, improve IT manageability and reduce vulnerabilities.”
The Business Challenge
UHSM has an IT user community of around 5200 people to serve, including 3000 users with NHS smart cards, 2500+ Desktops and 120+ mobile devices. As the organisation has become more and more dependent on IT systems the Trust IT infrastructure has grown in a complex and disparate way, and has become increasingly inflexible, being difficult and costly to manage and support. The organisation had 117 servers and 14 network communication rooms, with 3
computer rooms located on one site.
Applications typically had their own server with locally attached disk storage which is hard to manage and lacks resilience, and there were obvious system vulnerabilities. In addition, the requirement for disk space was growing at an increasing rate. Changes to NHS legislation were also tending to increase storage demands i.e. email compliance and Freedom of Information requirements. The Trust also needed to ensure that any new system would meet stringent security demands.
The Solution
The Trust had considered virtualisation technology in its broadest sense to develop its business continuity strategy. The benefits of server virtualisation are well understood, it helps to reduce capital and running costs, allows organisations to be more flexible in response to changes and helps to reduce the carbon footprint through lower power and cooling requirements. For the Trust to realise the full benefits, and to take advantage of full server virtualisation, an holistic storage solution was chosen allowing resources to be fully shared, and provide automated storage classification and migration which will also afford data protection.
Ray said, “The solution proposed by BMS has provided us with a resilient platform to consolidate our storage, contain server sprawl and improve manageability. The Trust has chosen HP blades and an HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) storage unit combined with VMware which allows testing and development particularly related to system integration and interfaces. Each blade requires fewer power cables than equivalent rack servers and it is easier to connect them. This will also reduce the cost of running the servers and reduce heat output in the computer rooms. The storage solution works with multiple platforms.”
Three computer rooms are currently operational. The Trust has moved secondary resilient servers to a second large computer room and has installed the virtual environment in there, which provides the in-built fail-over system to eliminate down-time.
“Where possible we are migrating services to blades, this will then facilitate the switch to virtualisation, running several ‘virtual’ servers on a single physical blade, with the objective to increase resilience and reduce redundancy” Ray continued, “and the future plan is to implement two mirrored units HP EVA server with two MSA60 disk shelves fitted with SATA drives and use Double Take software to facilitate server mirroring.”
Data will now be more secure and easier to manage, and the solution will give the Trust the capability to identify and resolve issues before fatal errors occur.
Virtualisation provides a high degree of resilience against hardware failure whilst optimising the utilisation of computing resources and the applications which share the fault-tolerant disk storage on the EVA.
The Benefits
The Trust is able to rapidly deploy new servers in minutes and recover failed servers if there is a problem. This saves operations staff time and provides the high capacity, high performance and high availability solution to facilitate business continuity. Ray said, “The whole package of the HP EVA, blades and double take software has proven to be an excellent solution. We are confident that with centralised storage and management performance will be improved, it will be easy to manage and will require little or no troubleshooting or additional staff resource.
Ray went on to say, “We should: enhance disaster recovery; reduce our power consumption; contain server sprawl; improve server utilisation; reduce application provisioning time and improve overall manageability.
The solution has provided us with more contingency and expandability and should deliver huge savings both in time and costs in the future.
Once again, we have successfully partnered with BMS who assisted us in identifying the right solution to take us to the next level of server infrastructure which will deliver the Trust significant technology benefits.
This critical investment in IT ensures that we have a first-class infrastructure which gives us secure storage and immediate access with inbuilt resilience.
We are committed to providing quality and responsive IT systems that underpin the best possible care for patients.”