A north London health authority has completed a major virtualisation project, cutting its operating costs and massively reducing its carbon emissions.
NHS Brent has virtualised 90 percent of its physical servers, removing 36 machines from its data centre, and, as well as saving money, has improved its storage facilities.
The authority has been working with Atlanta Technology on the virtualisation project, which has entailed the use of VMware throughout. For the storage element, NHS Brent is using Compellent Storage Area Network (SAN) to provide a highly scalable enterprise storage environment,
Atlanta has also implemented its own Disaster Recovery service. The Continuous Data Protection technology automates and synchronises local data with remote copies, meaning that NHS Brent would be able to restore business systems within 60 minutes of any data loss.
Richard Weston, technical services manager, NHS Brent said: "The move to a virtualised environment has enabled me to decommission 36 physical servers. This has not only saved a huge amount of money from powering the units, but also reduces administration time, and has freed up vital space. Our data storage requirements have been future-proofed as we can easily scale as needed and the disaster recovery we now have in place has improved our Recovery Time Objectives. Ultimately, knowing our data is secure now also helps me sleep a little better at night!"
This story, "NHS authority goes down virtualisation road" was originally published by Techworld.com.