CASE STUDY
CHALLENGE
Imperial College Healthcare NHS is one
of the largest NHS trusts in England. It
was formed in 2007 by the merger of
Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St
Mary’s NHS Trust with Imperial College
London Faculty of Medicine. It is one of four
major trauma centres in London, managing
five hospitals in the capital, employing close
to 10,000 people and treating more than a
million patients each year. The trust has a
rich heritage and an ambitious vision. As one
of the UK’s leading hospitals it is committed
to delivering quality care to its patients.
Technology has a fundamental role to
play in supporting the NHS. The Trust had
embarked on the process of virtualising its
server infrastructure but its enterprise SAN
storage was struggling to provide the required
performance and capacity. Management time
was also placing a heavy burden on the IT
team as staff were constantly tuning storage
to get the best input and output (IOPs) and
it was difficult to pinpoint any latency and
bottleneck issues. In addition, the introduction
of virtualisation meant the IT team were
expected to re-identify and re-tune per virtual
machine (VM). With close to 1,500 VMs, this
represented a huge resource overhead.
The Trust began looking for an alternative
storage solution that would be capable of
matching the performance, management
and capacity requirements of a virtualised
environment. After considering a number
of alternatives, the institution opted for
Tintri and purchased the solution without
the need of running a proof of concept
(PoC). “We committed due to the pressures
on existing storage and confidence
in the Tintri technology along with its
performance and implementation time,”
said Yusuf Mangera, Technical Architect at
the Imperial College Healthcare.
SOLUTION
The Trust bought three Tintri systems
with a five-year support and maintenance
contract. “Implementation took about an
hour to get the appliances installed and into
production. Migration from the centralised
SANs to the Tintri appliances took a week at
most,” Mangera revealed. “We put a Tintri in
each of our three data centres to distribute
our virtual environments. The results have
been very impressive. We operate 24
hours a day and there is a huge amount of
pressure from an administration point of
view in terms of troubleshooting, managing,
tweaking and tuning, but with Tintri that’s all
automatically done for us. We haven’t had
to look into any performance-related issues
for the last three and a half years. Tintri
just works to the point where people have
forgotten that the appliances even exist.”
Tintri has helped the Trust to improve
the efficiency of its staff without adding
headcount by virtually eliminating the
amount of time spent managing storage
issues. In addition, by moving all of its
VMware and Hyper-V storage requirements
to Tintri, the Trust has been able to
reallocate more of its SAN storage resources
to focus on physical servers, file services and
NAS environments.
RESULTS
Performance and capacity
The Trust was looking for a storage
environment that could provide the
performance and capacity required to
support its virtualised infrastructure. The
existing SAN storage was cumbersome and
required extensive management resource.
Mangera said: “The key feature in terms
of the Tintri appliances was the reduced
amount of administration required from
when we plugged them in and migrated.
Tintri works in the background without
anyone having to do anything.”
Reduced management time
Tintri has completely automated storage
management reducing the amount of time
and resources needed. With the previous
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