Moorfields Eye Hospital goes for virtual storage

 Moorfields Eye Hospital in London have installed a virtual storage server that allows them to add extra hardware and storage facilities seamlessly and allow data used by several sites to be backed up in one central location.

The hospital, which keeps a large number of images, electronic patient records and patient demographic and staff details on its books, installed the system across its 70 Windows servers after considering and rejecting more costly solutions. Around 13Tb (13million Mb) is currently handled by the systems.

Steven Gill, an IT manager at Moorfields who worked on the installation of the SANmelody system, said: "At Moorfields we are continually asked to provide additional storage to existing servers, which invariably means buying more internal disks or a new server. This takes time, incurs added cost and is disruptive."

Gill said that whenever he now gets a request for more storage, he can simply partition part of the virtual storage area. "Now all I do is simply allocate a 2Tb LUN [logical unit number] to the server and it only uses the disk it needs."

Gill considered a fully hardware-based solution, but discounted it on the basis of cost and scalability. Moorfields is also able to use tape backup for the virtual network, rather than discs, and use its own IP network as the connection between the storage computers.

Nick Broadbent, European product manager at DataCore, manufacturers of the system, told E-Health Insider: "Because we allow open choice in the future, you can lease any type of storage you wish to, without disruption or migrating to that storage."

He added that as the system was software-based, any problems caused by adding extra hardware was minimised: "What you effectively are doing is buying an infrastructure for the future in much the same way you would buy a LAN infrastructure."

The system was installed by NCE Europe, one of DataCore’s resellers. Matt Moss, account manager at NCE Europe, said: "The solution is an excellent fit with their existing architecture since it provided the increased efficiency, cost management and flexibility to meet their future demands."