Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust - Support Solution

Client Overview

The Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust was looking for a local IT partner that had a high technical ability and a track record of providing excellent customer service. Following a successful tender application highlighting our experience and commitment to our customers, Taylor Made were awarded the IT support contract to maintain the server environment across numerous sites, including Queen Alexandra and St Mary's Hospitals.

Challenges Faced

Due to continued expansion, lack of space for IT equipment was becoming a growing concern for the IT department. The existing IT room was nearing its capacity and a solution was required to avoid the need to provision a second room. As dependence upon the IT systems increased, minimising scheduled downtime had become a priority for the Trust. The Trust was also looking for ways to improve disaster recovery procedures, in order to minimise the impact on stakeholders in any eventuality.

Potential Business Impact

Due to financial pressures, cost improvements have been of paramount importance. The cost of not implementing the changes, includes running costs, space and lost time, far outweighed the investment needed to improve the services.

Solution

The introduction of virtualisation technology has reduced the amount of physical hardware necessary, minimising the necessary space requirements. This has also reduced power consumed by physical servers and cooling systems within the IT room - achieving significant savings on power charges and reducing the Trust's carbon footprint, in line with the Government's Green Agenda. The technology has also improved the disaster recovery provision, significantly reducing the impact on end users and patient care. Technology utilised has included: - HP Blade servers - NetApp SAN to provide storage and replication for disaster recovery and back up provision - VMware virtualisation software - VMware site recovery software to provide full failover and disaster recovery to a remote site - Microsoft operating systems - Symantec NetBackup where necessary

Results

By utilising advancements in technology, the Trust has been able to make significant improvements in system performance and efficiencies. The requirement for extra space provisioning for equipment has been eliminated. The Trust's carbon footprint has been reduced and cost savings increased. The new virtualised platform provides a more efficient, less costly, more robust platform, improving the IT services to support patient needs.

Future

The new virtualised IT platform is scalable, efficient and highly fault tolerant. This will enable Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust to respond to the changing needs of its stakeholders in a timely and cost effective manner. Taylor Made will continue to work with the Trust on the next planned stage of the project to improve the user experience. This will involve working closely with members of staff and users of IT to ensure that use of the systems is more streamlined and access to data is easy from any location. This, in turn, will help to improve the level of customer service and care that can be delivered to patients.