Health trusts cut operating system and storage complexity

When Gareth Bridges joined Wakefield Health Informatics Services (HIS) three years ago the situation he faced was familiar to many who take up a new job in IT.

Working for what is - in effect - the IT department of two primary care trusts, a mental health trust and 44 general practices across Yorkshire, with a total of 4,000 end-users, Bridges was faced with too much complexity.

The trusts and GPs were running a mix of operating systems - Novell, flavours of Unix, Microsoft Windows NT4.0 and Windows 2000. And there was more than a sneaking suspicion that data could be stored and managed more efficiently.

"It was getting very difficult to manage," says Bridges, Wakefield HIS systems manager.

Understandably the organisation wanted to standardise on a single operating system and single storage management platform.

For storage, Wakefield HIS had already been a Computer Associates (CA) customer. But after deciding to go for a Windows environment across the board, the organisation also wanted to looked around for the best storage software option.

Wakefield was advised by Trustmarque Solutions, with Bridges and his team looking for options such as capacity-based pricing as a way to move forward flexibly and cost effectively.

CA, with its BrightStor product, clinched the business but Bridges said there were other strong candidates. Veritas, now part of Symantec, was one and is perhaps the best known name in storage management, especially back-up.

Bridges said that Symantec's Backup Exec wouldn't have suited Wakefield's heterogeneous environment - even one in transition to Windows - and he said the higher-end NetBackup would have been "too expensive" for his organisation.

In March 2003 the decision was taken to go with CA's BrightStor software and at the same time overhaul licensing.

There was also a move to settle on a single-tape format - there had previously been little heavy-duty backing up to disk - and since then tapes used for back-up have been reduced from six to one. Bridges calculates the new set-up saves 20 hours per month in hands-on technical time.

He told silicon.com: "What we have now is more robust, more scaleable, definitely more reliable."

More than one million duplicate files have been identified, which is allowing Wakefield HIS to use its storage more intelligently - with 4 terrabytes of storage freed up.

Wakefield HIS has started to share its IT infrastructure - such as its use of Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange - with Mid-Yorks Hospital NHS Trust.

Bridges said he sees more engagement and more improvements in that area, enabled by a more streamlined IT set up.

And for CA, the storage management win could well open other doors: Wakefield HIS is now considering its products for disaster recovery and potentially security.

There are also extensions covering areas such as SRM (storage relationship management), creating a dashboard for IT pros for management of storage, as well as the BrightStor portal which provides trend analysis and information that is digestible for non-IT decision makers in the health service.

But for now the focus is on the 4,000 end-users he serves. "What we are doing enables us to provide a more robust [infrastructure] and that does help on the front line," he said.