Tracline to aid hospital with virtualisation cure

VAR tasked with saving Northampton General Hospital £435,000 over three years

Reseller Tracline has been selected by Northampton General Hospital (NGH) to help it slash power consumption and boost productivity.

The datacentre solution will be based on Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) Primergy servers, Network Appliance (NetApp) storage and virtualisation technology from VMware.

Tracline has been working with FSC and the NGH for nine years and the £280,000 virtualisation project contract was won in February. Tracline is now the sole supplier for the hospital.

Sales director Andrew Elliott said the migration of the hospital’s old system on to the new virtualisation system is expected to be completed this month.

He added: “Now the bulk of the job is done services will be provided as well as upgrades, where and when necessary ­ for example new blades.”

By consolidating its 75 servers and storage and backup technology NGH hopes to save in the region of £435,000 over a three-year period.

The hospital currently spends at least two hours a day on routine IT tasks, such as backup and administration. The new virtualisation project will reduce this time to less than 30 minutes.

Mark Gilkes, IT support manager at NGH, said in a statement: “The procurement of new hardware will allow us to significantly improve the management of servers, reduce total cost of ownership and increase productivity of staff, allowing us to deliver a better service to the trust.”

NGH serves a local population of 360,000 and has an annual turnover of more than £170m.