Dot Hill Selected by Oxfordshire Health Informatics Services

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has been selected by Oxfordshire Health Informatics Services (OHIS) to improve its storage capabilities.

 
OHIS, located within the John Radcliffe Hospital, serves the IT needs of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust (which includes four hospital sites: the Churchill and John Radcliffe hospitals, and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, and the Horton General Hospital in Banbury) and the Oxford Learning Disability Trust – with a total of over 10,000 IT users, in a variety of hospitals, clinics and Trust offices across more than 80 sites in the county.

The current storage solution was no longer scaling to meet the organisations’ needs. With OHIS’ data growing from 5TB to 17TB in three years and with no signs of slowing, a new DR strategy was needed.
 
OHIS’s virtual server environment is based on VMware vSphere with approximately 220 virtual machines making up approximately 55% of the OHIS server architecture and it supports a virtual environment for a variety of data from patient records to clinical application, administrative and clerical data.
 
When OHIS started looking for a new storage solution, price, performance and scalability were top of the priority list. After evaluating equipment from a number of Dot Hill’s competitors, it was decided that Dot Hill was the fit.

The new storage system should offer:

• Price-performance ratio
• Easy-to-use management tools, free of any server-based agents
• Certification for VMware applications
• Option for 2.5" HDD technology for performance density and
• Ability to expand capacity or upgrade performance with investment protection for longevity of storage assets.

OHIS worked with its long standing storage and virtualisation partner NCE Computer Group Ltd. which proposed the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3720 supporting 2.5" HDD technology and offering VMware certification.
 
Kevin Woodley, data centre manager at OHIS says: "The Dot Hill AssuredSAN platform is so straightforward to install and maintain, I literally spend just five minutes per month managing and monitoring the solution. The performance of the AssuredSAN arrays exceed-ed all of our expectations and demands, enabling us to deliver on our ‘three minutes to boot, 15 minutes to recover’ service level agreement, we call this our ASAP SLA."
 
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN family of storage arrays offers a range of upgrade paths, ensuring re-use of any existing investments in the product range. It provides a scalable foundation for the OHIS virtual server architecture which will grow hand in hand with business needs. A single Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 series array can provide up to 36TB of storage in a single 12 drive 2U chassis using 3TB SATA drives and scale up to 288TB per configuration.
 
Warren Reid, director of marketing EMEA, Dot Hill systems adds: "The Oxfordshire Health Informatics Service plans to extend its virtual server environment and virtualise 75% of its server infrastructure by the end of 2011. Their implementation of Dot Hill AssuredSAN systems means that future upgrades will be easy and cost-effective to implement. We are proud to work alongside one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK and know that our products and support are the best fit for the organisation."