ROYAL LIVERPOOL AND BROADGREEN UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS

ROYAL LIVERPOOL AND BROADGREEN
UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS
Faced with growing clinical data and performance
requirements, this hospital Trust chose EMC VMAX,
VMware, and optimal Flash drive performance
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals (RLBUH), part of the UK’s NHS, is one of
the largest and busiest hospital trusts in the north of England. With an annual budget of
over £400 million and 5,600 direct staff, the hospitals serve over 800,000 patients per
annum. The RLBUH has a number of critical strategic objectives including the provision of
excellence in patient care, as well as the achievement of cost efficiencies to drive the
development of additional infrastructure.
ESSENTIALS
Challenges
• Adopting new storage technologies to
manage 52 percent patient data growth
per annum
• Minimize storage costs and improve IT
efficiencies
• Maximize performance, agility, and data
availability
Solutions
• EMC VMAX
• EMC Centera
• FAST Suite
• Flash drives
• VMware
• EMC Consulting
• EMC Documentum and Kazeon
• Solutions for Collaborative Healthcare
Key benefits
• Next-generation storage technology
delivers high performance and availability
• Optimal Flash drive performance with
automatic storage tiering
• Significant savings pays for itself
• VMware increases availability,
performance, and redundancy
• EMC Consulting as a partner for nextgeneration IT solutions
• Rapid access to patient health data for
more informed diagnosis
Customer Profile
“IT is seen as the key enabler in supporting our clinical objectives,” says James Norman,
director of Information Management and Technology, RLBUH. “The hospital is faced with
decreasing funds, and our task is to search for efficiencies while also looking at new markets
we can move into.”
Norman notes that next-generation IT solutions can ensure that patients’ journeys are
tracked as they move through stages of hospital care, with the objective of delivering the
right treatment at the right time.
“Patient stays can be minimized. The quicker we can get a patient out of the hospital, the
better it is for the patient,” he says. “IT can also deliver efficiencies. Currently, we are setting
out to build a new hospital as part of a Public Finance Initiative. We need to build up our
financial reserves to contribute to that build. Our IT projects, and the search for cost
efficiencies and savings, are key enablers to yield such savings.”
Digitization of a variety of patient-related information including charts and medical images
was resulting in the significant growth of stored data.
“When we analyzed our data storage numbers, we found that we had a 52 percent growth
rate year on year,” Norman explains. “We knew that our storage requirements would
continue to grow as we manage structured and unstructured patient information coming in
the form of documents, images, and media. Everything is going digital. For instance, we plan
to scan all of our health records and also have the CSC/CareFX Clinical Portal. The imaging
and electronic data capture will result in a storage requirement that will be huge.”
Norman and his team sought a new storage solution that was strategic rather than
incremental to help enable patient care collaboration and cloud-enabled services; a sound
investment that would be future-proofed through scalable technologies, resulting in much
higher returns on investment, while also yielding high performance to deliver outstanding
patient services. Norman examined a variety of solutions including HP, NetApp, and the
next-generation EMC® storage solution, EMC VMAX™.
“We started looking at EMC VMAX, and the key deciding factors were performance and
scalability. HP and NetApp offerings were very good, but in tests did not give the
performance we needed, and would have ended up essentially as very expensive file
servers,” he says. “We could have quite easily uploaded our files onto these, but we would
have seen a gentle decline in data performance.”
“HP and NetApp offerings were very good but in tests did not give the
performance we needed and would have ended up essentially as very expensive
file servers… We went with EMC VMAX due to its high performance, scalability,
and cost effectiveness.”
James Norman
Director of Information Management and Technology, RLBUH
Having considered the alternatives, the RLBUH made the decision to purchase two EMC
VMAX enterprise storage platforms.
“We went with EMC VMAX due to its high performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness,”
states Norman.
VMAX FOR LOWER TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP
Norman also looked carefully at the numbers when making his decision to purchase EMC
VMAX.
“We looked at what our cost of storage would be moving forward, and we compared that
with the cost of buying VMAX,” he explains. “Over a five year period, it was much more cost
effective to go with VMAX than it was to buy individual SANs to meet our growth needs.
“We also looked at the physical size of the infrastructure and what it required from our data
center,” says Norman. We are going to consolidate three of our existing HP SANs into the
new VMAX systems. That will result in a significant savings in electricity and cooling for the
data centers, as well as a savings in maintenance costs. These are quite significant savings,
so VMAX virtually pays for itself by bringing it in. The savings offered by using VMAX systems
is allowing more of the budget to be put toward the Trust’s other projects.”
INTEGRATED VMWARE FOR EVEN HIGHER PERFORMANCE
AND PROTECTION
The RLBUH has long been VMware® and virtual machine users, but the benefits of
virtualization had not been accrued due to its legacy systems’ performance issues.
“While we were almost virtualized, we never saw the efficiency gains because we didn’t have
replication across multiple sites with automatic failover,” Norman states. “Going with VMAX
allowed us to facilitate a DR capability much easier.”
Norman notes that many critical hospital applications are now virtualized and stored in
VMAX. This includes Microsoft® SQL Server® databases associated with the Trust’s Patient
Administration System (PAS) electronic clinical system, local clinical applications, the order
system, and new Microsoft SharePoint® capability.
“We’ve pulled the patient demographic and activity data into SQL databases from the offsite
hosted PAS system, which means we can manipulate and use the data locally,” Norman
states. “This results in improved performance and data availability.”
“VMAX has the capability to host hundreds of virtual farms. The ability to deploy a new
system in its own virtual environment and the ease in which you can do that with VMAX just
wasn’t comparable anywhere else on the market.”
OPTIMAL FLASH DRIVE PERFORMANCE WITH AUTOMATIC
STORAGE TIERING
When purchasing the VMAX infrastructure, the RLBUH also chose to implement a Flash
strategy as part of the VMAX infrastructure. In addition, the RLBUH purchased a lower cost
EMC Centera® storage infrastructure for data archiving purposes.
“The performance you get out of Flash is fantastic, especially for your BI [business
intelligence] side,” says Norman. “We have the ability to use the expensive drives for the
right piece of software, and then if it’s not being used very heavily, it’s automatically moved
down to the less expensive side of our infrastructure. We don’t want to put non-critical
legacy data or data that isn’t being used much on expensive drives, and we have the ability
to move that data down to inexpensive Tier 3 drives.”
The FLASH strategy, incorporating high-performance Flash drives with FAST Suite nextgeneration technologies, optimizes data availability while automatically migrating data to
the appropriate tier in order to fully utilize storage infrastructure.
Virtual end-user computing: Enabling Exceptional
Patient Care
The RLBUH’s investment in EMC VMAX has also allowed it to pursue implementing a virtual
end-user computing capability.
“Previously, it just wasn’t affordable to go for full virtual end-user computing because the
backend servers were just too expensive,” says Norman. “Now that we’ve invested in VMAX,
virtual end-user computing is becoming a very real proposition. For instance, we’re looking
at “Follow Me” technology, which allows an authorized clinician to move from any desktop to
any other desktop. The first machine logs off automatically. When they go to another one, it
brings them straight back into the session they were in.”
“We’re going to trial it mainly around our HEC—our heart emergency chest department, and
A&E—Accident and Emergency department, where turnover of patients is high,” he adds.
“Clinicians working there don’t have time to waste to sit down and log on, so they need to
be flexible, with the ability to get hold of records instantly. ‘Follow Me’ will provide them
with fantastic benefits, and VMAX supports that.”
ACCELERATING THE JOURNEY TO CLOUD WITH VMAX
The adoption of EMC next-generation storage technologies and solutions for collaborative
healthcare, together with VMware and Flash strategies, has positioned the RLBUH to launch
private cloud initiatives when the time is right.
“Part of our business case to purchase VMAX revolved around the creation of a private cloud
that would enable us to provide cloud-enabled services to other health organizations within
our area,” Norman states. “The possibility of setting up a private cloud was something that
came about following a meeting with EMC. Cloud-enabled services will allow caregivers to
come in and get access to relevant information, even when they’re outside of our network.”
The possible establishment of private cloud offerings to other local healthcare organizations
has a number of benefits: helping the RLBUH meet growing data storage needs cost
effectively, as well as the sharing of patient documents and medical images and data.
“These are very appealing. Talking with EMC has helped us to form a strategy on what cloud
needs to do, and the steps that we need to put in place before we get entirely there. “What
we’re doing is building up a capability to share services with others, allowing them to tap
into our investments. The cloud will allow us to do that.”
EMC: THE WORLD’S LEADER
Norman is pleased with the RLBUH’s investment in EMC VMAX, VMware, and other EMC
solutions including the EMC Medical Image Management and Document Sharing solution
with Documentum.
“We worked with EMC Consulting to prepare and plan for the infrastructure platform, as well
as how we would migrate our data,” he says. “We also work with them to understand how to
best utilize this technology asset.”
“We chose EMC in part because of the company’s reputation in helping organizations with IT
transformation.” Norman adds. “EMC is the world leader. When putting in new
infrastructure, I want something I know is going to be reliable. I know it’s going to last, and I
know it’s going to scale. I don’t want something that I’m pulling out in a year’s time, and
that’s going down all the time.”
Norman concludes, “Our investment in VMAX was one of the biggest the Trust has ever made
in IT. It had to work. We needed to make sure that the partner we went with could deliver
and support it. We knew that EMC would.”
Contact Us
To learn more about how EMC products,
services, and solutions can help solve your
business and IT challenges, contact your
local representative or authorized reseller—
or visit us at www.EMC.com.
EMC2,EMC, Centera, the EMC logo, and VMAX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other
countries. VMware and the VMware logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc., in the United States and/or other
jurisdictions. © Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 02/12 Customer Profile H9603
EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.
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