22 February 2019

Imperial College Healthcare NHS, has deployed Tintri’s flash storage systems as a central piece in its virtualisation strategy.

Since deployment, it’s claimed the health trust has seen notable benefits including increased storage performance and capacity, as well as a reduction of downtime and administration.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS was formed in 2007 by the merger of Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary’s NHS Trust with Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine. It is one of four major trauma centres in London, managing five hospitals in the capital. The trust is said to be one of the largest in England, employing close to 10,000 people and treating more than a million patients each year.

Imperial College had begun the process of virtualising its server infrastructure, but its enterprise SAN was not meeting performance and capacity requirements. IT staff were constantly tuning storage to maintain performance, drawing them away from higher impact projects. With around 1,500 VMs, this represented a significant resource overhead.

After considering a number of alternative resolutions, the IT team at Imperial College deployed three Tintri systems. It’s claimed that immediately, the time spent managing storage dropped to near zero.

Tintri’s platforms supported the trust’s workloads across both VMware and Hyper-V, shrinking the storage footprint. Furthermore, Tintri says its VM-level quality of service controls allowed critical virtual machines to “perform flawlessly at all hours of the day”. As a result, Imperial College was able to re-deploy its SAN storage to focus on physical servers and file servers while Tintri managed the virtual estate.

Yusuf Mangera, technical architect at Imperial College Healthcare, says: “The results have been remarkable. We haven’t had to look into any performance related problems at all. Tintri just works to the point where people have forgotten that the appliances even exist.”