The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust selects Dot Hill Storage

The Dot Hill system supports the Trust in meeting UK government initiatives aimed at significantly reducing the number of NHS paper-based records. Dot Hill 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 seamless scalability to accommodate data growth across the entire organisation.

The newly implemented AssuredSAN Pro 5720 arrays, each hosting 58TB of data connected by a new 8Gb Fibre Channel QLogic infrastructure, serve approximately 5,000 users across the Trust, allowing them to view archived patient records. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5720 uses a combination of solid state disks (SSDs) and traditional SAS hard drives, all managed by Dot Hill’s intelligent RealStor software. RealStor 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 dramatic difference to performance and ultimately productivity.

“We had explored dynamic auto-tiering data 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 at 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 successful 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 24x7 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 easily capable of supporting a much 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.