Server Consolidation using virtualisation - The South Eastern Health

Services

Introduction:

The South Eastern Health Services Executive is a division of the National Health Services Executive the largest employer in the State, the HSE employs more than 65,000 staff in direct employment and a further 35,000 staff are funded by the HSE. The budget of almost €12 billion is the largest of any public sector organisation.

Project Summary:

The South Eastern Health Services Executive was operating a large number of individual Intel servers each running a number of different applications. These servers were taking up a lot of space and power. In many cases they were running at a fraction of their potential capacity and moreover, there was no resilience set in-place for these servers.

The Challenges / Issues:

The HSE's environment needed to be consolidated into a smaller, more efficient and resilient server infrastructure to ensure the smooth running of their wider operations into the future.

The Solution:

Origin implemented a VMware solution on two large Intel servers along with an IBM SAN which allowed all seventeen servers to be transferred into virtual machines. As a result the entire environment was consolidated down from an original seventeen to just two servers. In addition to this, Origina also provided a resilience solution that enabled all seventeen of the new virtual machines to run on either of the new Intel servers in the event of a failure of one server.

The Business Benefits:

The completed work delivered clear and measurable savings for the HSE in relation to the management and day-to-day running of their data centre, as well as reducing the power and storage costs involved, as well as delivering greater resilience and greater levels of efficiency in the overall management of their IT infrastructure.

Tomás O'Leary, Managing Director of Origina said "the consolidation of their environment has will deliver huge administrative and cost benefits. The HSE's infrastructure has been made far more efficient and robust, ensuring greater service levels into the future through the future."

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