DATA STORAGEQuick access to patient data
Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have
joined forces to deploy IT solutions that allow instant access to patient
records and enhanced disaster-recovery facilities.
The Trust is one of the largest teaching trusts in the UK and comprises
three major acute teaching hospitals and smaller units located across the
city. It serves a population of 3 million and provides local services to
Newcastle, regional services across the north-east and Yorkshire, and some
national services.
With such a huge geographic and demographic population to serve, the
Trust wanted to enable patient records and radiology images (of which 6
million are produced every year) to be easily available across all
locations regardless of where the original documents were stored.
Additionally, because of the critical nature of the information being
transferred, it wanted a robust disaster-recovery facility.
The Trust chose Ferrania Imaging Technologies’ picture-archiving and
communication system (PACS)/radiology information system (RIS), and HP to
implement the IT infrastructure required.
HP consolidated existing storage with two EVA 5000s — enterprise
virtual arrays — providing approximately 25TB of storage per site. This
was replicated at two of the Trust’s sites to ensure maximum backup of
data and an availability commitment of 99.9%.
HP also implemented four ProLiant industry-standard servers at each
site and transferred all existing ‘direct attached storage’ data to the
new no-single-point-of-failure infrastructure.
According to HP, the resulting infrastructure will reliably interact
and fulfil all the fundamental strategic requirements of the Trust.
Additionally, this virtual storage environment is more easily managed than
its predecessor and has the ability to accommodate increased demands for
patient data in the future.
Cost savings were another benefit, because of the move from film to
digital image storage, while the modular nature of the infrastructure
allows for increases in storage at relatively low cost.
Source: bjhc&im September 2005
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