STHK Backup Solution

St Helens and Knowsley NHS Health Informatics currently provide IT services to partners across the north of England. Partners include St Helen's and Knowsley Hospitals NHS Trust, North West Boroughs Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust as well as CCGs and GP practises across St Helens, Knowlsey and Halton.

The Health Informatics service operate two datacenters from Whiston Hospital which host all services currently provided to partner organisations. Services delivered by the HIS include Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, File Storage, Clinical Systems, VOIP Telephony, Wired / Wireless Networking and Desktop Computing. Infrastructure is hosted on a mixture of physical servers and VMware virtual hosts with the HIS adopting a virtual first approach to new systems.

Given the criticality of the systems operated by the HIS there is a requirement for a robust backup programme to be in place. The current Commvault solution is several years old, backup data is written to EMC Isilon storage in the Whiston datacenters and then put out to LTO tape for offsiting and long term archival of data.

With the ever growing threat of cyber security and increasing quantities of data the HIS wish to procure a new backup solution that is able to leverage both on premise and cloud based storage. The new system should provide vital assurances to HIS partners that data is backed up successfully, allow for quick recovery times and provide offsite and archive storage without the need for tape.