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News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2006
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 12 July 2006
NHS Foundation Trust Chooses Dell
University Hospital Birmingham chooses Dell EMC CX700 SAN, Dell 2650 PowerEdge servers and Dell Professional Services to enhance its storage and email environments
University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, which has 6,500 employees, provides traditional district general services for the population of South Birmingham and specialist treatments for the people of West Midlands and beyond The University Hospital Birmingham Trust is one of the leading hospitals in the country and is one of the first hospitals to have gained foundation status
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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NHS Foundation Trusts were created under the Government's Health and Social Care Bill.
To achieve this status, hospitals must meet national quality standards so that they can receive new opportunities to invest in improving services that meet the needs of patients and staff.
To maintain its leading position, the University Hospital Birmingham needed to implement new software and hardware to adhere to the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) schedules.
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The NPfIT is a government initiative that aims to ensure that the NHS can rely on computer systems to deliver a high quality of patient and public services efficiently and securely.
With a legacy Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 clustered email environment servicing approximately 6,500 email inboxes across two different sites, the University Hospital Birmingham was experiencing escalating performance and management issues.
Stephen Chilton, technical development manager, University Hospital Birmingham, says: "While there were 6,500 users with active email accounts on the network, there were about 12,000 actual accounts".
"Those redundant accounts were still receiving organisation-wide emails and causing us significant problems in terms of storage space".
With a database in excess of 360GB of data within Exchange Server 5.5, we were finding it difficult to back up because we couldn't break it down into smaller components.
"We also had a number of performance issues".
"We needed to consolidate our existing server environment so that we could better cope with storage growth and deal with the range of operational difficulties we were facing on a regular basis." As the Trust's solution partner, Dell provides support and advice around potential implementations and services.
The Trust approached Dell in January 2004 to help it migrate from its existing Exchange 5.5 Server environment to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and update its storage hardware to a new Dell | EMC CX700 storage area network (SAN) and consolidate its server environment on DellTM PowerEdgeTM 2650 servers".
With the migration to Exchange Server 2003 and the Dell | EMC CX700 SAN, the Trust was able to:.
* Increase the number of nodes in the cluster - this provides greater availability and reduced disruption in the case of a system failure.
* Break down the database into smaller components - by using four different mailboxes, data is backed up more easily, while any corruptions can only affect a proportion of the email service.
Why Dell? - Chilton says: "Dell is a longstanding strategic partner of ours and with their service space skills and access to a portfolio of solutions we can work with Dell to ensure we are being provided with the best solution for our needs at a highly competitive price.
Dell designed and project managed the solution and used a technology partner to deliver the service".
Chilton says: "Having Dell project manage the solution ensured that any issues were resolved quickly and effectively through a single point of contact and that all our objectives were met." Dell's project team employed industry best practices to deliver success on time and within budget.
Chilton comments: "Dell's experience in delivering workable technical solutions was essential to the success of the project".
In fact, it was Dell's suggestion that we spread each of our departments across a number of databases.
This ensures that in the event of a loss of service due to a database corruption for example, the whole department need not be affected.
"Dell understood that we held them ultimately responsible for the success of the project and took a very active role, not just in project management but also in putting their previous implementation experiences to use in a more practical way." With plans for the development of a new hospital underway, the University Hospital Birmingham must ensure that its IT infrastructure is operating at an optimum level.
Chilton says: "We are endeavouring to become a leading teaching hospital and this latest Dell solution helps us to support the Trust in achieving that goal." Dell is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006 the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage, now in its 6th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme, and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 18 - 19 October 2006.
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