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United Kingdom-Based Health Service Provider Kent & Medway NHS Reaps Rewards of Going Virtual for Storage Management With DataCore Software's SANsymphony and SANmelody

Posted on: Thursday, 20 April 2006, 09:00 CDT

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. and READING, England, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- DataCore Software today announced that Kent & Medway National Health Service (NHS) is relying upon DataCore's SANsymphony(TM) as a common, working infrastructure for storage management as well as a "platform for the future." Based upon this platform, the Kent and Medway Health Informatics Service (KMHIS), which serves as the one-stop-shop for Information Management and Technology for the NHS organizations across Kent and Medway, provides needed IT services to this large hospital trust as well as delivering the reliable infrastructure and support needed for all of the organizations that now comprise East Kent National Health Services network.

Recognized by the World Health Organization as one of the best health services in the world, Britain's National Health Service was set up in 1948 and is now the largest organization in Europe. Within the East Kent NHS, the East Kent Region covers East Kent Hospitals, East Kent Mental Health and four Primary Care Trusts that cover the area. KMHIS is responsible for all aspects of IT including the telephone system, desktop computers, servers, application development, the local area network (LAN), the wide-area network (WAN), the storage area network (SAN), as well as the overall support function for this IT infrastructure.

Because East Kent NHS moved from a single hospital trust into a larger area comprising the aforementioned groups, there was an increasing requirement for more and more statistics and records to manage from each of the various organizations that now make up East Kent NHS. Along with this was the fact that the existing applications were coming to the end of their life in being able to support the increasing requirements inherent to a larger East Kent NHS. There was a danger that each department would start to implement large database systems such as SQL Server and that there would be a growing series of isolated storage solutions which would become difficult to manage, particularly as the capacity requirement seemed to be growing very rapidly.

This scenario was avoided when KMHIS chose to deploy and host DataCore's SANsymphony. Kent & Medway NHS worked with a local reseller who provided storage solutions in the past, and they convinced the team that comprised KM HIS that SANsymphony would serve as a platform for the future. Initially, a solution was implemented using about 1.5TB of storage in a dual-path configuration with two SANsymphony nodes (Storage Domain Servers or SDSs) managing the same storage. SANsymphony provided resiliency to combat inherent unreliability of disks and overall disk failures. Over the course of the deployment and as more storage and reliability was needed, a different manufacturer for disk arrays was selected. Fortunately with SANsymphony's hardware independence coming into play, the selection process was an open choice. An improved design whereby the enterprise would not be dependent on a single storage array was implemented. This has meant that despite disk failures, the business is unaffected due to the automatic failover features as well as the data mirroring recovery functionality across different storage platforms. When further capacity was needed, a third storage manufacturer was used with equally satisfactory results.

Julian Waltham, IT Manager at KMHIS said, "In working through our challenges, SANsymphony has proven to be a solid solution and does exactly what is needed. We now have mirroring between three different storage arrays without issue. It also enables us to change our storage vendors and take advantage of price cuts. SANsymphony is also modular and scalable and functions that we did not want on 'Day 1' have been easily made available subsequently." This is best illustrated by the recent addition of SANmelody(TM) to extend the existing solution and include a disaster recovery (DR) site 20 miles away from the Canterbury office in Dover.

The team at KMHIS is using mirroring, network managed volumes and AIM and is managing Windows 2000 and 2003 applications, including half a dozen SQL databases, a 4th Dimension database and some flat file databases such as Access and Paradox. As the Trusts need additional storage, they will gradually add applications with the intent of hosting all of their data. KMHIS will only use the DR site for the critical data -- about 2Tb today. In total, SANsymphony is managing 11TB of storage. Of that, 2-3TB is synchronously mirrored and 2TB is asynchronously mirrored to the DR site.

"The overall benefit of SANsymphony for Kent & Medway NHS has been the product's inherent ability to offer their enterprise a choice of storage, particularly affordable storage," said Nick Broadbent, Managing Director- European Operations, DataCore Software. "The product's reliability makes up for the unreliability of the disks in the storage arrays and the central storage management means the team at KMHIS doesn't need to know about all the different storage management GUIs. The robustness of the product has provided the common storage infrastructure that they were looking for. And the modular approach has also helped this health service organization by providing them with a cost-effective DR solution."

About Kent & Medway (East Kent) NHS

The NHS was set up in 1948 and is now the largest organisation in Europe. It is recognised as one of the best health services in the world by the World Health Organisation. The Kent and Medway Health Informatics Service (KMHIS) is a central IM&T (information management and technology) resource offering IT-related services to the local NHS in Kent and Medway. For more information: http://www.kentandmedway.nhs.uk/.

About DataCore Software

DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage. DataCore's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held with corporate headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.datacore.com/.

DataCore, the DataCore logo, SANsymphony, SANmelody, SANmaestro, SANmotion and Powered by DataCore are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

DataCore Software

CONTACT: Bettye Grant of DataCore Software, +1-954-377-6000 orFax: +1-954-938-7953, publicrelations@datacore.com; or Stuart Smith of RedNine PR, +1-954-514-0937, ssmith@redninePR.com

Web site: http://www.datacoresoftware.com/http://www.kentandmedway.nhs.uk/

Source: PRNewswire

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