Veeam Backup and Replication software chosen by NHS Trust

Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust has put into effect a new backup and disaster recovery system to support its growing virtualised IT infrastructure.
 

The trust has installed Veeam Backup and Replication software, which slashes data recovery times down from hours down to minutes.

Data centre manager at Oxford Health Informatics Service, Kevin Woodley, said the technology had proved its worth within the first week of operation. He said : “One of our live production servers had hung. The time-honoured solution to this problem would be to power off and power on again. However, this time the server failed to boot up," 

"Traditionally, a situation such as this would have required a full rebuild and potentially long downtime. With Veeam installed, we were simply able to boot the DR replica and have a live system operating again within three minutes.”

Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals has three major sites, serving more than 600,000 patients. It was an early adopter of virtualisation and now has a "virtual first" policy that says any new IT infrastructure implementation has to be virtual.

At the moment, 25% of its infrastructure is judged to be "mission critical." This will increase as the trust plans on an increase in virtualisation from 50% to 75% by the end of the year.

Initially it was spending control and budgets that had driven Radcliffe’s move towards virtualisation with reduced hardware costs, pace for machines and power use.

Woodley went on to say: “However, as more than 50% of out estate became virtualised it became clear that our disaster recovery processes were not suited to the virtual environment. We needed a disaster recovery solution specifically tailored to that environment."

The chosen Veeam product allows for an expansion in the virtual infrastructure as it imposes no limit on the number of machines that can be replicated or backed up.

Oxford Radcliffe followed Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust, which announced an installation of Veeam Backup and Replication earlier this year.

For information on disaster recovery and business continuity solutions clickhere.