HP has deployed its first Performance Optimised Data Centres (POD) on the island of Ireland, at the Ulster Hospital, Belfast, for the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust.
The 6 meter PODs are capable of delivering the equivalent compute power of a 186 square meter ‘bricks-and-mortar’ data centre (DC). The deployment for the Trust hosts an HP private cloud solution in a single virtual data centre environment for all the Trust’s IT operations. It is a reliable, cost-effective solution, says HP, providing IT services to the Trust’s four hospitals and 120 facilities.
The Trust, and its hospitals, had identified several needs arising from a four year review programme entitled “Transforming Your Care”, said Róisín Coulter, director of planning, performance, informatics, South Eastern Healthcare and Social Care Trust. As well as a realisation that the Trust needed to maximise the use of technology to meet emerging needs, the review also found that patients want care as close to home as possible, following a general trend for services to move out of hospitals and into communities. To facilitate these developments, the Trust required a more flexible, easy to manage, expandable and scalable IT infrastructure.
Steven Stewart, assistant director, Technology and Telecommunications, South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, said that the POD infrastructure had allowed IT to implement many of the changes required in the programme at the same time as new clinical buildings were being built. The POD approach also meant that space in clinical buildings was no longer taken up by IT infrastructure.
“Demand for IT services in the healthcare sector has grown exponentially in the past few years, but the simple fact is that hospitals are not designed to house data centres,” said Stewart. “We have centralised all server support for the Trust at the Ulster Hospital, which is undergoing a rebuild. Originally this included the provision of two new bricks-and mortar data centres but, instead of putting an expensive data centre in each of the new buildings, we have located two containerised HP PODs right next to them. From day one, we know that the HP PODs will deliver scalable capacity to meet our compute requirement for the next seven to 10 years.”
“The PODs were the best option to achieve density and right positioning of IT infrastructure,” said Stewart.
The HP private cloud solution not only makes the Trust’s internal IT more agile and responsive, it also provides a secure, flexible, reliable platform for future development. Two HP Client Virtualisation systems enable the Trust to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and deliver IT connectivity anywhere, anytime, from any device. Rapid, secure provisioning of virtual machines enables the Trust’s mobile workforce to enjoy a ‘bring your own device’ scheme (BYOD), improving user productivity.
“This new infrastructure will enable the Trust to modernise and improve its delivery of services to patients without being constrained by ICT capabilities,” said Edwin Poots, Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety in the Northern Ireland Executive. “As they move within and between different locations, clinicians will have immediate access to patient information. This will give professional staff more time to spend with patients and ensure that the appropriate care can be delivered in the right place and at the right time.”
“We should be proud of where we are on this,” added Minister Poots, who cited EU recognition for age support services in Northern Ireland, which also draw heavily on IT services for operation.
Each of the Trust’s high density PODs houses a CloudSystem comprising space-saving ProLiant BladeSystem c7000 enclosures with virtualised ProLiant BL460c Gen8 Server Blade. High availability Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb Ethernet Modules simplify the connection of the server blades to an iSCSI storage area network (SAN) based on scalable StoreVirtual Storage systems. The PODs are connected across a 40GB campus fibre network utilising a FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5920v backbone to improve IT productivity by unifying the virtual and physical fabric.
In conjunction with its partner BT, HP was involved from the initial stages of the deployment of the PODs, from planning to RFP and designing the specification. HP Technology Services provided complete implementation services, and will ensure that the HP PODs run without interruption. A five-year HP Proactive Care agreement on the data centre equipment provides fast resolution coupled with active services to help prevent problems before they occur.
“The complexity and speed at which technology moves in the healthcare sector meant that the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust needed to be more responsive to IT needs across its organisation,” said Martin Murphy, managing director, HP Ireland. “The rapid availability of scalable compute power offered by HP PODs has enabled them to bring forward their development plans.”
Peter Ryan, SVP Enterprise Group, EMEA MD, HP, highlighted some of the benefits of the POD infrastructure, with speed of deployment chief among them. Stewart of the Trust confirmed that from order to deployment, the PODs for the Trust took only 3 months to deliver. Preconfigured, tested and proven, they were immediately pressed into use and provided immediate value.
Stewart said that the Trust’s PODs are able to use free cooling for most of the year, significantly reducing running costs. The PODs are easily managed through the OneView management system, allowing a ‘single pane of glass’ view, with remote management capabilities, all of which are viewable from mobile devices such as smart phones.
The Trust’s POD infrastructure also enjoys a low Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.2, which is competitive with the leading conventional facilities.
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