Welsh health board Cwm Taf has upgraded its IT infrastructure and is working towards a virtualized environment.

It said it currently has 250 virtual machines (VMs) split between two data centers that represent 60% of its entire server environment.

In 2012 the health board decided to base its entire virtual infrastructure on Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 as it was seen more cost-effective and provided a consistent service.

Veeam will be providing the health board with back up and restore for Microsoft Exchange meaning it can restore on an item level rather than restoring the full mailbox, saving the board crucial time.

The vendor's software will enable the health board to restore virtual machines within a matter of minutes which it claims is not possible with other solutions.

It said the software is easy to use and backs up in the cloud as well as off site making it easier to restore.

Cwm Taf said if the services on the virtual servers were to fail it would be “forced” to rely on paper-based equivalents, which in turn would compromise efficiency in patient care.

The health board currently operates nine hospitals, 140 medical, dental and optometry practices and a number of pharmacies.

Cwm Taf health board’s head of sever management Matthew Palmer said virtualization is a “crucial” technology as it provides scalability and efficiency.

He said the health board’s previous backup tool was designed for a physical environment.

“…we did not have the level of capability we needed: simply recovering an individual item could take at least one day, as we had to first restore an entire server. We could also only perform backups once a day, meaning a failure could wipe out up to 24 hours’ worth of work” Palmer said.

Cwm Taf’s sever manager Ian Alden said within the NHS cost is a massive drive and anything to reduce costs is seen as a positive.

Veeam’s V8 backup and replication agent claims to backup data in 26 ways and CIO’s will not have to “babysit” the software.

The health board said it can now ensure critical capabilities such as its clinical applications, healthcare systems and nurse rostering are backed up.

Veeam’s product strategy specialist Rick Vanover said its software can recover items within minutes and it is an “incredible way to restore data”.

“We want people to be virtual,” Vanover said.

Since implementing Veeam backup and replication across its servers Cwm Taf said it had seen numerous benefits including a quicker restore, the ability to restore individual items within minutes rather than days and the simplicity of the software.

Alden said the move to its new virtual environment has been a “breath of fresh air” for the health board.

“In the future we hope to commission this further by reducing our physical servers and consolidate where possible to Hyper-V. We also hope to back up and restore Sharepoint.”