The UK healthcare organisation has cut admin tasks and simplified patient access records by going from three-tier to Nutanix Cloud Platform
Business Need
Mid Cheshire NHS Hospitals Foundation Trust provides general healthcare services in northwest England and aims to “inspire hope and provide unparallelled care for the people and communities” of the area.
With its previous generation of IT infrastructure beginning to wind down and reach the end of support contracts, Mid Cheshire was looking for an affordable alternative approach. That approach needed to support a new patient record system and offer the flexibility, reduced administration overheads, performance and scalability it needed.
Key Results
Lower admin, faster actions.
Now, Mid Cheshire can operate on a slim team of IT professionals with one provider covering its compute, storage and networking needs.
Access to a vibrant ecosystem.
Having bought into Nutanix, Mid Cheshire can now explore a broad array of tools to automate processes.
A bridge to the Azure cloud.
Mid Cheshire is keen to explore how it can best utilise Microsoft’s cloud platform and now it can use Nutanix to bridge between the on-prem and cloud worlds.
"Traditionally, we’ve been a VMware estate for hypervisors but due to costs we’re moving across to Nutanix AHV because it’s efficient and it’s a cost saving. Anything we can do to improve efficiency is something we’ll look at. We’re making quite a saving not having to redo our VMware estate and it opens doors for us in terms of reduced admin and access to a new ecosystem."
Challenge
Like all UK public-sector organisations, Mid Cheshire has had to operate within budgets but it also needed to install a new records system to monitor patients in a secure, automated way and to maintain an archive system for clinical IT trials.
“Before Nutanix, we had an old-fashioned separate storage on NetApp, separate compute on HPE and separate networking on Cisco environment,” recalls Matt Palmer, Deputy CIO.
“Storage in particular was challenging: adding SSDs to the SAN was ridiculously expensive. It was a no-brainer to move to Nutanix and the reliability, ease of administration and general manageability has meant we have stayed with it. The big Nutanix benefit is it has one console to manage everything.”
Solutions
Storage and backup specialist partner Epaton recommended Nutanix to Mid Cheshire and technology demonstrations followed, eventually leading to Mid Cheshire assembling a business case for its budget holders. Today, Mid Cheshire is using Nutanix to run its main production workloads, including the new patient records system.
“Our core change need was patient records,” Matt says. “It’s better for our clinicians because it means we have one system to hold all information rather than them having to go back to paper notes or looking across multiple systems. We have the electronic patient record (EPR) and a patient’s context link to the archive with a one-click connection that provides seamless access to data for our people.
“An 8u rack replaced everything and we had environmental benefits with less power and less cooling.”
Deployment was made easier through free Nutanix University and Epaton training sessions.
“It’s a straightforward process: a box that plugs into another box that plugs into our network,” Matt says. “It’s all software-driven and that means it’s easier to upgrade and patching is not a nightmare any longer... it checks itself.
“The support knowledge base and the support portal are usually spot-on. One of my favourite things is that the Nutanix and Epaton people can’t do enough to help and guide you. They like to help you and they see everything through Nutanix Pulse so, when you make changes, you can ask, ‘is that change going to break anything?’”
Outcomes
Maintenance costs year on year are down “and with Nutanix we know what we’re paying through the life of the kit”, Matt adds.
That familiarity is seeing Mid Cheshire invest yet more in the Nutanix relationship.
“Traditionally we’ve been a VMware estate for hypervisors but due to costs we’re moving across to AHV because it’s efficient and a cost saving for us,” says Matt. “Anything we can do to improve efficiency we’ll look at doing, and we’re getting quite a saving by not having to redo our VMware estate.
“The big thing for me was that the number of systems has increased because needs have grown. If we had had the same complex three-tier setup, we would have to increase the size of our admin team quite considerably, whereas we have not had to do that with Nutanix.”
Next Steps
Mid Cheshire has big plans for the future which includes scope for making more use of cloud.
“We’ve got some of our servers in Azure so we’re looking at pulling a case together for managing that through NC2 to simplify management and have one consistent tool for cloud and on prem,” Matt says.
“The benefits of cloud are capacity-related but the downside is it’s expensive. There are clear benefits in less downtime, management ease and capacity. This is where we think running NC2 will help us, as opposed to buying servers.”
Security could also be augmented.
“What I’d like to see going forward is using Nutanix Flow for micro-segmentation,” says Chris Thomas, Mid Cheshire head of infrastructure. “We’ve been trying to do it using another vendor but feel this could be the way forward. That would give us a big boost in implementing Zero Trust security.”
Partner
Epaton
As a Nutanix Champion Reseller, Partner of the Year 2023 and a Top 5 UK Nutanix partner, Epaton have established themselves as trusted thought-leaders within the IT industry over the past10 years. Supported by in-house Nutanix specialists, Epaton are dedicated to helping all organisations do more, for less, better, by aligning bespoke solutions with the people and culture of your business. As a valued group of experts, Nutanix and Epaton’s partnership is pivotal in our growth journey, together and independently.
