Case Study: The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust achieves zero unplanned downtime with IBM FlashSystem

Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust maximizes availability while embracing new technology

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, a regional NHS health organization serving more than one million people across four hospitals and a neuro rehabilitation unit in England, needed to replace aging storage infrastructure that was at capacity and nearing end of life. With critical clinical systems requiring 24/7 availability, the Trust had to avoid unplanned downtime and find a low-risk migration path for its complex SQL environment. IBM FlashSystem storage was selected to support this mission-critical care environment.

IBM, working with partner Covenco, implemented three IBM FlashSystem 5000 arrays with an IBM HyperSwap configuration and IBM Spectrum Virtualize to run the new storage in parallel with the legacy environment. The result was zero unplanned downtime, planned downtime of just five hours per cluster, around 90 minutes saved per day in storage management, and significantly improved performance and reliability for clinical systems.

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust

Jav Yaqub

Head of Infrastructure