New IT solution will save NHS Lanarkshire £100k
08 December 2010
Savings to be made thanks to virtualisation and power management tools implemented by Northgate Managed Services
A partnership between NHS Lanarkshire and leading ICT services and solutions company Northgate Managed Services will save the regional health board a total of over £100,000 a year.
Northgate has introduced a new server virtualisation solution which will reduce NHSL's overall server estate by 88%. Having previously maintained 350 servers across its estate, Northgate helped NHSL virtualise 170 of these on to 20 physical servers, resulting in considerable energy and cost savings as well as increased flexibility and utilisation of hardware.
In addition to this, NHSL has around 8,000 devices, including PCs and laptops, and to date 1,250 power management tools have been deployed. These have reduced power consumption by defining and enforcing system wide policies across devices, for example; standby, hibernation and sleep timings and automatic wake up and turn off times based on user and system inactivity.The remaining 6,750 will be implemented over the coming months.
When completed, the total annual savings will be £100,000 plus per annum.
Gavin Cox, head of IT Infrastructure for NHS Lanarkshire, said: "We're delighted to be working in partnership with Northgate Managed Services to deliver solutions which not only reduces costs, but increases efficiencies and staff productivity and well as improving security and customer services.
"All this demonstrates our commitment to investing in technology to the benefit of staff, patients and the general public. Northgate has created an infrastructure that can grow and develop in line with our business needs in the future."
NHSL is responsible for improving the health of more than half a million people living in North and South Lanarkshire, employing 12,000 staff across 120 sites to do so.
James Turnbull, managing director of Infrastructure Solutions for Northgate Managed Services in Scotland, said: "With the introduction of a scaled, virtualised environment, NHSL will achieve significant cost savings and efficiencies in terms of reduction in capital and maintenance costs, power consumption, carbon footprint and server room cooling.
"The solution delivers a highly secure virtualised environment and dedicated backup, to manage and control all backup and restore operations. This results in high availability with no single point of failure.
"The solution has been designed with the flexibility to scale as required and grow with the business needs. There is also improved response and increased flexibility to business requirements with rapid virtual server provisioning when required..
"We are delighted to be working with NHS Lanarkshire as the first health board to implement this tool which we would hope to take to other health boards across Scotland and the UK."
