07 May 2025

The Northern Care Alliance (NCA) NHS Foundation Trust, one of the UK’s largest healthcare providers, serves over a million people across four major hospital sites and extensive community healthcare settings in the Manchester area. With 15 petabytes of data supporting critical systems — from Electronic Patient Records (EPR) to pathology and radiology applications — the Trust’s IT infrastructure is essential for patient care.

However, with their existing data centre reaching capacity, the NCA faced an urgent need to relocate operations to a new facility at the Royal Oldham Hospital while repurposing its previous North Manchester General Hospital (NMGH) site for another NHS Trust.

This migration presented a high-risk scenario. Any disruption to the data centre could have severe consequences for patient records, diagnostic imaging, and real-time hospital operations.

No room for downtime

Recognising the critical nature of this move, the NCA turned to Covenco. Migrating an entire hospital’s live IT infrastructure is far from a routine task. The NCA faced several key challenges, including:

• Seamless fibre channel integration – The new data centre lacked the necessary fibre channel network infrastructure, essential for high-speed data transfers between storage and compute resources.
• Budgetary constraints – A full-scale new IT environment build-out was not feasible, requiring a cost-efficient migration strategy.
• Time-sensitive deployment – The NHS operates 24/7, allowing only a brief maintenance window for migration without disrupting patient care.
• High volume data transfer – With 15 petabytes of mission-critical data, the risk of service downtime, data corruption, or misconfiguration was significant.

“The services delivered by the IBM Storage and Compute layer are critical to patient care in the hospital. It is no exaggeration to say that lives are dependent on their availability,” says Imran Bashir, Lead Technical Architect at the NCA.

A phased, high-precision migration strategy

Given the scale and complexity of the migration, Covenco devised a bespoke, two-phase approach that would ensure system integrity while minimising disruption. Rather than the conventional approach of setting up a new environment and gradually transferring data, Covenco employed a hybrid strategy that blended hardware consolidation, real-world testing, and a high-speed transition model.

Covenco’s engineers conducted a comprehensive audit of the NCA’s existing data centre infrastructure. Working closely with Alex Yusuf, Datacentre Team Lead, the team mapped the Fiber Channel switch design, consolidating outdated, slower devices into newer, high-speed switches to eliminate network bottlenecks.

To pre-empt risks, Covenco created a test bed environment at the Oldham data centre using rental storage arrays and servers. This allowed teams to simulate full-scale data replication over a high-speed WAN connection, revealing the need for additional high-bandwidth fibre optic cabling — a crucial discovery that ensured optimal network performance during migration.

Originally, the NCA planned a gradual, staged migration over several weeks. However, as deadlines tightened, a ‘Big Bang’ strategy was adopted to migrate both live and disaster recovery (DR) systems within a single week. This approach minimised operational downtime but demanded meticulous execution.

“It is a testament to the Covenco team that they were able to keep the project on track despite the complexity of the data centre and the mammoth tasks involved,” says Alex Yusuf, Datacenter System Manager, NCA.

48 hours of precision under pressure

The migration was conducted in two phases:

Phase 1: Disaster Recovery (DR) Migration – The first step involved moving the DR environment, ensuring a stable fallback system at Oldham before the high-risk live migration. This phase was completed smoothly, boosting confidence for the next stage.

Phase 2: Live System Migration – At 10 minutes past midnight on a Friday, the NCA and Covenco teams initiated the migration by shutting down all live hospital services, including EPR, radiology, and core patient applications.

The next 48 hours involved a highly coordinated effort including physical relocation of servers, storage arrays, and network equipment, which were carefully transported from Manchester to Oldham, ensuring integrity. New Storage Area Network (SAN) switches were configured to restore connectivity. Every server-to-storage path was mapped with precision to prevent data access issues. Live data from Manchester’s storage systems was replicated at Oldham, ensuring data consistency. Finally, a full-scale system audit was performed to confirm error-free operation before bringing services online.

“I have been involved in dozens of critical projects as the hospital has moved these sites. This was the seventh move of its type. Credit to the Covenco and NCA teams for delivering this project under the greatest of pressures,” says Bashir.

A flawless transition

By Sunday evening — well ahead of schedule — the migration was complete. Extensive testing confirmed that all critical hospital services were fully operational, allowing normal healthcare operations to resume by Monday morning.

The move delivered several key benefits including minimal downtime with zero disruptions to patient services; a new high-speed fibre channel network with better performance, efficiency, and scalability; no delays for re-training or adaptations; and a modernised facility with enhanced capacity, security, and long-term scalability.

“Despite meticulous planning, unforeseen challenges inevitably emerged. However, the collaborative spirit between the teams shone through. Engineers worked side-by-side, troubleshooting problems efficiently and implementing solutions with resolute calmness,” reflects Alex Yusuf.

The successful migration was not just a technical victory — it had a profound impact on patient care, IT efficiency, and healthcare innovation. IT staff morale was boosted, and patient care enhanced with uninterrupted access to medical records and diagnostics and streamlined treatment workflows.