Helping the Welsh Ambulance Services to keep pace with increased demand

Challenge

Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust cover an area of 20,640 kilometres and serve a population of 2.9 million, their diverse area encompasses tranquil rural retreats, busy seaside resorts and large urban conurbations.

They attend more than 250,000 emergency calls a year, over 50,000 urgent calls and transport over 1.3 million non-emergency patients to over 200 treatment centres throughout England and Wales.

The Trust was trying to keep pace with increased demands on their IT infrastructure, much of which was overdue a refresh.

Solution

• Out of date hardware and software needed replacing to ensure maintainability and allow for new services within the trust.
• Current Disaster Recovery (DR) provision needed reviewing to improve RTO’s and RPO’s in the event of a major incident.
• ET proposed the Nutanix Hyperconverged software defined enterprise cloud platform based on Lenovo hardware with data protection from Commvault.
• This provides a single platform for virtual and block workloads, split across the live and DR sites and managed through a single pane of glass. It supports VMware and Hyper-V as well as the included Nutanix AHV hypervisor to deliver maximum flexibility.
• Hardware enabled snapshots driven by Nutanix or Commvault provide rapid data protection and recovery options.
• Current Disaster Recovery (DR) provision needed reviewing to improve RTO’s and RPO’s in the event of a major incident.

Benefit

• Radically simple – Nutanix offers a hyper-converged datacentre appliance that does away with the complex traditional three tier datacentre stack (compute, SAN fabric and storage)
• No disruption to ongoing operations during upgrades or capacity changes
• Fully resilient architecture with no single point of failure means no interruption of service in the event of individual component or entire node failures
• Scales easily and massively – one node at a time. Buy only the exact storage and compute capacity you need, when you need it
• Simplified click management: a single pane of glass for administration of the VM infrastructure and one from Commvault for the data protection
• Rich analytics – one click access to all critical system information with predictive analytics to reduce the burden of IT planning, supported by Commvault for the analytics of the data protection copies
• Integrates with existing virtualisation environments and providing seamless migration between these hypervisors: VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Acropolis AHV
• Advanced enterprise-class storage capabilities with fully integrated DR, snapshots, cloning, deduplication, compression and high availability built in
• Connects directly into the public cloud (Amazon or Azure) or private cloud for integrated DR-as-a-service and/or Backup-as-a-Service to reduce costs
• The ability to run test and development workloads across the sites as required
• Commvault provides a unified data protection platform across all hypervisors involved including potentially cloud workloads, working with the Nutanix snapshot capabilities to provide rapid application aware protection and recovery
• Commvault provides advanced tools to assist in compliance with data protection and recovery requirements