Data centre sprawl virtually stopped

Eastern Health deployed a fleet of new Dell blade servers in its data centres along with a variety of Hewlett Packard boxes and EMC SAN drives for storage and archiving.

Servers and storage will be virtualised towards the end of the project, primarily to reduce server footprint and to benefit disaster recovery and business continuity.

Gardiner expects its 140 servers to be reduced to a "very low number" but could not name a precise consolidation figure.

"We are in the early days of virtualisation, but we are moving quickly and we won't waste time once it becomes a focus," he said.

Tiered storage was introduced across the data centres along with a new archiving methodology .

Deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 began as part of a phased replacement of the 2003 version.

Speed networking

Network upgrades were modest by comparison to the unified communications projects, thanks mainly to previous capacity upgrades over previous years.

However, Gardiner and his team still faced ageing server infrastructure, an unreliable Local Area Network (LAN) and a "less than desirable" Wide Area Network (WAN) which lacked adequate redundancy and subsequently had multiple points of failure.

"We needed to give the LAN a health check and get the right tools in place to see where network bottlenecks occur, and to measure thresholds at different points," Gardiner said.

Extra redundancy was built into the WAN to introduce multiple paths between key sites, and new VoIP infrastructure was added to maintain quality of service for IP communications.

Gardiner's team of communications and network specialists continued deployment of new wireless networks across five greenfield sites and will outfit most of Eastern Health's existing sites with access points.

A fleet of 110 Blackberrys was deployed to staff for limited remote access, while an existing Virtual Private Network (VPN) provides full access to local applications from anywhere in the world.

Gardiner's IT Service Management (ITSM) mash-up of IT Infrastructure Management (ITIL) and Projects in Controlled Environments (PRINCE2), will be pushed further into the organisation over the course of the IT makeover.

A planned migration to EDM will save the organisation big money by cutting down its printing requirements that produce hundreds of thousands of sheets a month, and give the organisation a green IT image.

Gardiner stifled a laugh when asked if Eastern Health will be a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) shop by the end of 2010. "We're keeping our options open over the long term."