Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation adopts a virtualisation model to improve access to resources and ease management.

England’s largest specialist women’s healthcare provider has adopted a virtualisation model to manage its complex and challenging IT infrastructure with a small technical team of six.

Joining 18 months ago as director of information management and technology, Dr Zafar Chaudry decided to put his experience of virtualisation, gained during work in the US healthcare system, into practice. Working with Dell, Chaudry has deployed a VMware ESX server, with nine PowerEdge servers and two Dell/EMC CX500 Sans and a PowerVault LTO tape library.

Chaudry and his team have completed the server virtualisation process, and have almost finalised the centralisation and pooling of the storage capacity. Data is also mirrored to a second storage area network at a disaster recovery site.

When the project started Chaudry estimated that it would provide growth for the next five years.

‘Initially, when we looked at our data we found about 500GB, now six months later we have about 1.5TB – that is a 300 per cent increase because, once people became more confident with the principle of centralised storage and the San, they would then admit to owning data. So we keep finding new bits,’ he says.

The next step for the team is to tackle storage virtualisation.

‘The storage side is more difficult than the server side because you have to look closely at your data and work out appropriate policies for storage, retrieval and discarding,’ says Chaudry.

‘These policies then have to be ratified by the board and the people who are concerned with governance.’

Developing an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy has also become an important factor for the hospital, with clinical data growing at 20 per cent each year.

‘We are at the start of our storage virtualisation process and it has to go hand-in-hand with our ILM strategy,’ says Chaudry.

‘So far we have gathered all our data together in one place, and mirrored it to give us resilience with minimal delay for retrieval. Now the organisation is ready for the next step but as yet there are no real standards for storage virtualisation or significant implementations.’

Lack of standards and vendor lock-in are two concerns for the hospital, but Chaudry recognises that a risk has to be taken.

‘We had a huge debate about iSCSI or the expensive fibre channel route, but at the time we needed to make a purchase iSCSI wasn’t mature enough,’ he says. ‘The reality is that whenever you buy any product there is lock-in to some degree. The final choice is about assessing the benefits to be gained against the price to be paid.’