North East London Integrated Care Board (NEL ICB)
The North East London Integrated Care Board (NEL ICB) of the UK National Health Service (NHS) managed to leap legacy hurdles and reduce spend and administrative overhead by shifting off legacy infrastructure to an all-new private cloud environment.
Business Need
NEL ICB plans and commissions public healthcare provision for a large area of the UK’s capital. It came into being in 2022 and, like many contemporary organisations created from a previous organisation, it faced disruption in moving away from legacy three-tier IT to a more modern approach. Risks and costs loomed large and it needed a more flexible setup with lower overheads and without technical debt.
“It was a legacy NetApp environment with two datacentres and a lot of rack space consuming a lot of power and it was coming to end-of-life status. We built a business case to bring in Nutanix to transform and move our virtualised estate from VMware to AHV. There was a lot of cost saving to be had and operational overhead to remove. It had been a nightmare to manage and we wanted to move to a ‘single pane of glass’ for easier management, reduced overhead and simplified licensing.”
— Phil Cook, Senior Infrastructure Manager, NEL ICB
Key Results
Significantly Reduced Debt
NEL ICB now has a modern environment with greater efficiency in terms of value, performance and with reported reductions in power consumption.
Single Pane of Glass
Administration overhead is much reduced for operations and vendor management is streamlined.
Hardware Simplification
A dramatically reduced hardware estate means more IT control.
Products Used
- AHV Virtualization
- Files Storage
- Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
- Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Challenge
Created in 2022, NEL ICB is responsible for healthcare spend and performance in a densely populated area of London. Facing a legacy three-tier NetApp and VMware environment, the organization struggled with high costs, technical debt, and excessive power consumption across two data centres.
“I wanted to get away from VMware because there wasn’t much innovation going on and the costs were going through the roof,” said Neil Goodman, Enterprise Architect.
Solution
The solution involved replacing NetApp storage and VMware virtualization (including Horizon VDI) with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. Despite internal resistance to hyperconverged infrastructure, the business case proved undeniable through data modelling and projected cost savings.
Outcomes
- Hardware Consolidation: A massive reduction in physical footprint from 22 nodes to 8.
- Seamless Migration: All changes occurred without downtime impacting critical NHS IT services.
- Strategic Validation: The 2023 Broadcom acquisition of VMware validated NEL ICB’s path as they avoided rising licensing costs.
- Improved Morale: Stretched IT teams now benefit from simplified management and license consolidation.
Next Steps
NEL ICB now has a platform to make incremental improvements. According to Cook, “There’s a conversation about the strategy for NEL ICB and moving some data and services to the cloud through Microsoft OneDrive, Sharepoint or Teams. But there will always be a virtual server infrastructure we need to support.”
“There’s also a lot of push towards AI to do more with less,” said Cook. “We have most of our corporate data in Nutanix Files Storage and I predict that we will move to a national cloud-based service, probably Microsoft.”
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