Healthy outlook for hospital data centre transition

The project, involving the move of thousands of UK hospital patient records, required a flexible supplier who could engage quickly to accommodate stringent timescales. Redcentric’s connectivity and N3 commercial aggregation services – achieved this within a week.

Redcentric was selected by System C, the UK’s leading health and social care software provider serving over 140 NHS trusts and organisations, to help it make a quick and efficient move from its old parent company’s data centres, to its two new UK colocation sites which will be connected to the N3 network.

Speedy connectivity is critical to System C’s data centre changeover, which is due for completion in March 2015. System C also needs to ensure high availability, on-going service and support to its customers, who increasingly are choosing to move to UK-hosted patient records and hospital management systems.

System C originally considered working with BT for N3 services but due to prohibitive cost and timescales for the project decided to rethink this. Following recommendations from its data centre provider, System C chose Redcentric because of its N3 commercial aggregator status. Redcentric is one of only a few providers authorised to assess and approve applications from third party organisations needing to connect to N3 – one of the first companies to be granted aggregator status in 2014.

Using Redcentric’s N3 aggregation and connectivity, System C can reduce the time taken to complete the necessary governance procedures to gain access to the network, because Redcentric is authorised to manage this on the provider’s behalf.

Redcentric is delivering two primary and two back-up fibre circuits into System C’s selected colocation data centres, as well as N3 connectivity. Each circuit has 30Mb of layered bandwidth over which N3 will be laid.

Andrew Outram, technical services director, System C Healthcare, comments: “Meeting project timescales as well as costs is absolutely critical to this data centre transition project. Our customers need assured access to their cloud-based systems via the N3 network so continuity of our services is paramount.

“Redcentric has been impressive – gaining approval for our N3 access application within a week and simplifying how we connect to the N3 network. The company’s responsiveness and ability to pick up the phone around service design and questions that arise is really important. They’re an extension of our internal IT team adding value to our business above and beyond this project.”

Mark Hall, divisional director of public sector Redcentric, said: “N3 is critical to the effective running of health and social care services but the process of connecting can be time consuming for organisations like System C, who enable their end users to have patient care and effective hospital management at the top of their agendas. Our N3 connectivity and aggregation services take the pain away.”