Veeam Software has completed a deal with the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust to supply its Veeam Backup & Replication software.
Veeam Software is a provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management offerings for virtual datacentre environments, while The Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust is a major UK Healthcare provider serving over 600,000 patients.
The trust currently maintains three data centres, containing 168 physical servers and 217 virtual servers.
The trust has virtualised a variety of Microsoft and other applications, including many critical clinical applications and SQL Server databases.
Veeam Software said that recovery of data and applications that would previously have taken up to a day to complete can now be performed in minutes, reducing the risk of doctors and other staff being unable to do their jobs effectively.
Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust has adopted a "virtual first" policy that any new IT infrastructure implementation is to be virtual.
Currently, Veeam Software said, 25% of the virtual infrastructure of the trust is viewed as mission-critical.
The trust intends to have 75% of its infrastructure virtualised by December 2011. Consequently, the proportion of mission critical virtual infrastructure is set to increase.
Veeam Backup & Replication offers several key features including; cost benefits, as Veeam allowed the trust to replicate its entire virtual infrastructure at 50% of the initially budgeted cost; recoverability; backup; and scalability.
Oxford Health Informatics Service Data Centre Manager Kevin Woodley said virtualisation not only helps lower hardware costs, but side benefits also include reductions in power use, space needed for physical machines and carbon emissions.
Kevin Woodley continued, "With plans to virtualise more and more of our estate, we needed a disaster recovery solution specifically tailored for a virtual environment. At the same time, it had to provide the best possible performance at the lowest cost.
"Veeam Backup & Replication has fulfilled all these needs and more, allowing us to take advantage of the benefits of virtualisation without putting patients at risk through unsuitable data protection."
