Case study: Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust

Pic credit: Richard Croft

Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust (NHT) has consolidated IT systems at its datacentre to the extent that it is able to explore the possibility of renting out spare capacity.

In 2004, the mental health trust had a server room that was straining to serve the needs of some 7,000 users. “It was more of a broom cupboard than a server room. When it got warm, the smell of silicon was not good,” says Steve Wilkes, systems manager, corporate IT health informatics service, at the trust.

By 2006, the trust had a purpose-built datacentre where all devices had a dual-power supply, and it was equipped with a sophisticated under-floor cooling system designed by Wilkes.

“The datacentre is cool, stable, with guaranteed power and biometric access control to ensure security,” says Wilkes, but he wanted further improvements.

“We are a mental health trust so don’t do blood and bandages. A lot of our work is documented, such as clinicians’ notes, and we have 23TB of critical data across the trust that needs managing and protecting,” he says.

Virtualisation was the next step, and after experimenting with the technology, VMware was rolled out for production systems.

“Nearly 85 per cent of our server estate is virtualised, and we plan to do a further 10 per cent by Christmas. We have consolidated and simplified our datacentre,” says Wilkes.

Direct-attached storage was replaced by a storage area network (SAN) based on NetApp technology that works with the virtualisation software. The move has cut management time for Wilkes and seven systems engineers by 70 per cent.

Instead of 16 cabinets housing 170 servers, the Nottingham datacentre now has two cabinets housing the SAN, two cabinets with the virtualisation technology and three cabinets with Citrix servers.

Meanwhile, a sister site at the Rampton Hospital (above), which is connected to the Nottingham datacentre and mirrors data, has consolidated 50 servers to 12 VMware servers and six Citrix servers.

The result is a much greener datacentre.

“We have halved our requirement for cooling and power, but the real benefit is we have made available half the capacity we formerly used by freeing up storage space,” says Wilkes.

This opens up the possibility of “offering services for disaster recovery capability to like-minded trusts as a potential revenue stream,” says Wilkes.

Although no decisions have yet been made, Wilkes says this opportunity could enable the trust to meet the requirements of the government’s cost improvement programme, which demands efficiency savings of between 3.5 and five per cent per annum.

Irrespective of this happening, Wilkes has a datacentre that is flexible and easy to run.

“Life is easier for us,” he says. “If we roll out a new package on one server, we can check if it works and roll it out across the server estate. We have a manageable datacentre, which allows us to easily restructure, swap-out and scale up and out. This in turn gives us more free time to perfect the monitoring side of things so we can be more proactive.”