Challenge
Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust cover an area of 20,640 kilometres and serve a population of 2.9 million, their diverse area encompasses tranquil rural retreats, busy seaside resorts and large urban conurbations.
They attend more than 250,000 emergency calls a year, over 50,000 urgent calls and transport over 1.3 million non-emergency patients to over 200 treatment centres throughout England and Wales.
The Trust were trying to keep pace with increased demands on their IT infrastructure, much of which was overdue a refresh.
Solution
Out of date hardware and software needed replacing to ensure maintainability and allow for new services within the trust.
Current Disaster Recovery (DR) provision needed reviewing to improve RTO’s and RPO’s in the event of a major incident.
ET proposed the Nutanix Hyperconverged software defined enterprise cloud platform based on Lenovo hardware with data protection from Commvault.
This provides a single platform for virtual and block workloads, split across the live and DR sites and managed through a single pane of glass. It supports VMware and Hyper-V as well as the included Nutanix AHV hypervisor to deliver maximum flexibility.
Hardware enabled snapshots driven by Nutanix or Commvault provide rapid data protection and recovery options.
Current Disaster Recovery (DR) provision needed reviewing to improve RTO’s and RPO’s in the event of a major incident.
Benefit
- Radically simple – Nutanix offers a hyper-converged datacentre appliance that does away with the complex traditional three tier datacentre stack (compute, SAN fabric and storage)
- No disruption to ongoing operations during upgrades or capacity changes
- Fully resilient architecture with no single point of failure means no interruption of service in the event of individual component or entire node failures
- Scales easily and massively – one node at a time. Buy only the exact storage and compute capacity you need, when you need it
- Simplified click management: a single pane of glass for administration of the VM infrastructure and one from Commvault for the data protection
- Rich analytics – one click access to all critical system information with predictive analytics to reduce the burden of IT planning, supported by Commvault for the analytics of the data protection copies
- Integrates with existing virtualisation environments and providing seamless migration between these hypervisors: VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Acropolis AHV
- Advanced enterprise-class storage capabilities with fully integrated DR, snapshots, cloning, deduplication, compression and high availability built in
- Connects directly into the public cloud (Amazon or Azure) or private cloud for integrated DR-as-a-service and/or Backup-as-a-Service to reduce costs
- The ability to run test and development workloads across the sites as required
- Commvault provides a unified data protection platform across all hypervisors involved including potentially cloud workloads, working with the Nutanix snapshot capabilities to provide rapid application aware protection and recovery
- Commvault provides advanced tools to assist in compliance with data protection and recovery requirements