NHS Stockport upgrades data centre with help of Cisco, CDW and Cohesity

Foundation trust revamps IT infrastructure resulting in 20x app performance gains

NHS Stockport Foundation Trust has completed a data centre upgrade enabling dramatically improved app performance, data management capabilities, and multi-year cost savings.

The trust, which sees over half a million patients every year, tapped backup and recovery provider Cohesity, technology solutions company CDW and tech giant Cisco to overhaul its IT infrastructure, after facing new challenges running a large network of hospitals and clinics across various sites.

Chiefly, the Trust’s mission-critical applications were stored on servers sprawled across three hospitals and two dozen clinics, hamstringing speed and exposing them to vulnerabilities.

New infrastructure, designed by CDW, incorporates Cisco’s Hyperflex hyper-converged infrastructure, Intersight SaaS Systems Management Platform and Application Centric Infrastructure.

Cohesity software installed on Cisco servers provides data management tools, fast backup, and data recovery.

The solutions are installed across the trust’s two data centres, providing integrated backup, archiving and file storage capabilities. Synchronous replication, continuous backups, and seamless failover ensure resiliency against potential attacks or system failures, the companies said.

“When you have disparate systems and too many management tools, there can be problems with backups, integrations and licensing. We no longer have those problems, thanks to CDW, Cisco and Cohesity,” explained Hugh Hughes, network and unified communications lead at NHS Stockport, which has an IT team of just 25 people responsible for service delivery to 6000 employees.

“We now have the right data centre infrastructure in place, and we know we’ll get more out of it in the months and years ahead.”

Joachim Mason, UKI specialists director, Cisco, said, “Having a simplified, robust and resilient data centre infrastructure is important for any organisation, but for healthcare providers, it can be critical. That’s why we’re proud to support NHS Stockport together with Cohesity and CDW.”

“By consolidating the Trust’s legacy IT infrastructure, Cohesity was able to deliver a highly efficient data management solution that removed infrastructure silos so often seen in healthcare organisations,” added Andrew Fitzgerald, Western Europe sales director, Cohesity.

“In addition, the NHS Stockport team was able to leverage backup data for development testing while enhancing its security posture – critical as more organizations are being targeted by cyberattacks.”