Stoneleigh gives QEH a datacentre facelift

Revamped: The old datacentre at QEH was replaced over a 70-day period.

Stoneleigh Consultancy has upgraded the ageing infrastructure of Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Woolwich, South East London.

The network and datacentre consultant was tasked with providing the hospital with full redundancy and reduced power consumption.

John Crowe, project manager at Stoneleigh Consultancy, said: “It was a real team effort to get the project turned around in just three months.”

The upgrade involved hardware from Fujitsu Siemens Computers, including the vendor’s FibreCAT SX80 SAS storage, the FibreCAT TX24 off-line tape storage and Primergy RX300 back-up servers.

Crowe said the hospital’s datacentre was creaking at the seams. “It had very old technology. Also, on such a tight NHS budget, the QEH needed a system that was SAN resilient and redundant, which would operate 24/7 and require minimum support staff with no single point of failure.”

“It took Stoneleigh 70 days to migrate the hospital, with solid support from vendor FSC systems integrator Ezis and distributor Micro-Peripherals. Stoneleigh was the glue that held everything together,” he added.

Tracy Ross, senior project manager at QEH NHS Trust, said: “The hospital’s datacentre was reaching the limits of power consumption and heating issues.

“However, the real catalyst has been a move to an on-call support service rather than a permanently staffed team.”