University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay (UHMBT) Trust has made data management easier after implementing a cost-effective Spectra disk and tape solution across the hospital’s main infrastructure.
The hospitals in the North West trust required a long-term solution to provide reliable backup of email, unstructured file data and SQL databases from numerous departmental clinical systems, such as pathology, pharmacy and endoscopy. In addition, UHMBT said it needed 24/7 access to live data overnight backups to avoid affecting the busier daytime hours.
Spectra joined forces with CommVault to integrate with its Simpana software to substantially lower the cost of protecting, managing and accessing information across the NHS trust.
The installation, deployed in the main data centre in Barrow in Furness, forms an important part of a five-year plan to improve the IT infrastructure at the trust and meet overall financial and performance targets at the organisation.
The front-end architecture consists of CommVault Simpana software, which provides policy and configuration management, while the back-end features Spectra nTier Verde technology for nearline disk storage and a Spectra T-Series tape library.
The nTier Verde 4U has been configured for 77TB of capacity at a cost of less than 35p per GB. The T50e library consists of two LTO5 drives, which can accommodate the combined capacity of up to 626TB with 8 drives and 100 tapes, for dense, low-cost and long-term data retention, backup and archiving.
The joint solution is said to have provided UHMBT "with four times the capacity of previous storage at half the cost", said the trust.
Competitive products from vendors such as EMC Isilon, Nexsan and Quantum are said to have been evaluated.
University Hospitals Morecambe Bay says it is now enjoying shorter backup times, increased confidence in its ability to carry out restores, and the storage capacity to meet the future demands of the organisation.