Expanding the data center was not possible as the main power phase was stretched to the limit. Instead, Dorset worked with specialist healthcare IT specialist CSA Waverley to develop a new infrastructure that unlocked space, reduced power draw and provided a flexible future-proofed infrastructure.

DHFT is a specialist trust, providing mental health, learning disability, addictions, community brain injury and community dental services for a population of more than 700,000 people in eastern Dorset, and a number of services across the whole county.

The organisation operates across 30 sites and has more than 2,000 users working off 50 servers and 1,000 PCs and laptops. All its sites use individual backup mechanisms supported by an IT team of 10, which provides service, support and management functionality across all mental health services in Bournemouth and east and west Dorset.

DHFT’s data center sits on a limited spur of the local electricity network and is housed in an old Victorian building with poor energy performance. Legacy infrastructure also generated considerable amounts of heat that required large amounts of cooling, which in turn drew heavily on power. “We had critical issues with power,” says Nigel Rodgers, head of IT at the trust.

“These problems meant we were overdrawing power by 10% with inefficient servers and overburdened air conditioning that couldn’t cope. The power problem became critical in the winter months, when staff used electric fan heaters. But due to the size of the server room we couldn’t legally introduce a second phase to cope with any further technology.

“Worst-case scenarios have seen one phase blow, which put a third of the building out – including the computer room – and forced a temporary return to a paper-based office system. This is totally unacceptable, as patients sometimes found themselves in the dark. Our electric bill was astronomical and our IT systems were far from resilient. The IT team’s mission to improve capability meant a new building, the purchase of a substation – or a technological miracle,” says Rodgers.

To combat the problems, CSA Waverley used a Novell PlateSpin PowerRecon Assessment to qualify that DHFT could consolidate its existing estate of over 50 servers, reducing power requirement and saving space.

The team developed a value-for-money plan to consolidate the trust’s Windows server estate, based on HP DL Servers, but maintained some existing HP Unix technology for flexibility.

Virtualisation became the only feasible option given the constraints of the challenge. As a result, HP blades running VMware ESX and two management blades have been introduced. The application of VMware and blade architecture has paved the way for future projects to consolidate and migrate both live and legacy Unix systems to a virtual environment.

DHFT says the consolidation work has slimmed infrastructure by 67% and saved 74% on its energy bill. “Energy has been saved by using less hardware and HP blade power management, which powers down unused capacity during low-usage periods. In turn, our air conditioning has been turned down by 5o per unit. The proliferated impact has been phenomenal. We have future-proofed the trust’s capability,” explains Rodgers.