We are delighted to announce that we have been awarded the contract to procure, configure and deliver a Software-defined data centre for Gloucestershire NHS Trust to provide a resilient, multi-tenant infrastructure platform which can provide IT services across multiple organisations within the trust and support its ‘Journey 2 Outstanding’ vision.
Traditional data centres have been constructed with siloed infrastructure layers, purpose-built hardware and fragmented management, resulting in complex deployment and operations and slower delivery of IT services and applications. The Trust is in the fortunate position of having existing, well-established virtualisation platforms across several data centres and remote sites.
Our work in the NHS Back to News & Events"We are excited about the opportunity to work with Gloucestershire NHS Trust to deliver a very innovative, secure and cost-effective solution. Through various workshops and engagements, we were able to capture both the operational requirements and organisational objectives which will improve both user experience with IT systems ultimately resulting in improved patient outcomes."
However, these services are non-standardised and of different ages, so we needed to design a solution which would leverage the existing suitable datacentres in Gloucester and Cheltenham to provide cross hospital resiliency with improved availability and performance for an enhanced staff and clinician experience across the Trust.
One of the main requirements of the platform is to deliver centralised IT infrastructure services for multiple organisations across the trust in a secure, multi-tenant environment. This is needed to support the Trust’s ability to become a private cloud provider to departments within the trust as well as other NHS organisations across the county without any additional overhead on staff to manage platforms.
The Hyper-Converged Infrastructure solution combines compute, storage and management onto industry-standard x86 servers, delivering a Software-Defined Datacentre. The virtualisation of the infrastructure elements means they can now be delivered as a service. Deployment, operation, provisioning and configuration are abstracted from hardware and implemented through software intelligence meaning it can be managed by the internal IT teams with reduced day to day administration to allow focus on system efficiency and improvement.
This simplification of infrastructure is becoming increasingly important across every industry as specialist IT skills become more scarce and more expensive. Enabling generalists to deploy and manage their environment, automate functions, especially manually intensive tasks related to provisioning and operational management, and scale with ease has the potential to radically change the way on-premise infrastructure is built. Whilst Cloud services are not a priority for this Trust right now, the solution needed to be fully ‘cloud ready’ to be able to seamlessly integrate into the public cloud.
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