Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Arrays at The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Dot Hill Systems Corporation announced its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series arrays with real-time auto-tiering have been selected by the UK’s The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
to support the rollout of numerous mission-critical, patient-facing and
clinical applications.

The Dot Hill system supports the Trust in meeting UK government initiatives
aimed at reducing the number of NHS paper-based records. Its arrays also
support a kiosk-based patient self-check-in system and a renal reporting system
that aids medical staff across the Trust’s seven hospitals by providing links
to the UK Renal Registry. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 systems are part of a larger
IT project that will assist the Leeds Teaching Hospitals to improve the overall
patient experience, while simultaneously providing scalability to accommodate
data growth across the organisation.

The implemented AssuredSAN Pro 5720 arrays, each hosting 58TB of
data connected by a 8Gb FC QLogic infrastructure, serve approximately 5,000
users across the Trust, allowing them to view archived patient records. The AssuredSAN Pro 5720 uses a combination of SSDs and traditional SAS HDDs,
all managed by Dot Hill’s intelligent RealStor software. It continuously
monitors incoming data requests and migrates data sets to the most appropriate
storage medium to ensure the highest possible performance. The key to this
system is that the data movement occurs in real-time, unlike other auto-tiering
solutions which perform data migration as a batch process at a later point in
time. For many applications, RealStor real-time tiering makes a
difference to performance and productivity.

"We had explored dynamic
auto-tiering storage solutions in the past but they had been beyond our budget,
so when we learned that Dot Hill had brought this technology within our
financial reach, we were quick to explore it," said Ian Davison, head
of IT operations, Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust.

The Leeds
Teaching Hospitals, one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK, decided to turn to
Dot Hill for a second time following its implementation a year
earlier of two AssuredSAN 3000 Series arrays. The 3000 Series has been
instrumental in supporting a genetic sequencing application which has run
flawlessly since installation. Early in 2013, the Trust’s IT department was
tasked with the challenge of providing a storage architecture capable of
meeting the demands of numerous new and existing virtualised applications, most
of which were mission-critical, requiring 24×7 availability. The aggregation of
applications in a virtual server environment also presents dynamic data
workloads whose peaks in demand are often difficult to predict.

Davison continued: "The real-time
tiering function of the AssuredSAN systems removes the complexity of
anticipating the peaks in storage I/O demands presented by a diverse and
dynamic range of applications, and allows us to benefit from the high
performance of solid state drives without having to implement this costly
technology on a larger scale. Since installation, our AssuredSAN arrays have
required no administration; they just work."

Although the Trust’s Health-view system presented the initial requirement for a
new storage infrastructure, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 systems have proven to be capable
of supporting a wider range of applications hosted within the Trust’s
VMware environment. Further mission-critical applications supported by Dot Hill
arrays include a Renal Reporting System, an industry-standard SQL-based
solution providing interfaces to dialysis machine networks, laboratory and PAS
interfaces and data conversion to national standards, including the UK Renal Association
timeline. This system serves approximately 80 medical consultants across all of
the NHS Trust in the northern counties and also provides links to UK Renal
Registry.