2bm win contract to transform old post room into new state-of-the-art data centre

From ‘fragile to agile’

In August it was announced that 2bm had successfully won the bid to design and build a state-of-the-art data centre for Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Luton (HBL) NHS at their Welwyn Garden City site.

HBL ICT Shared Services’ (http://www.hblict.nhs.uk/) vision is to become the ICT provider of choice by providing customer led ICT services and innovative solutions that improve patient outcomes – with the added value of reducing operating costs.

The site’s existing infrastructure was aging and having not received any investment over the last six years was subsequently beginning to represent a significant risk. A more agile and resilient platform was needed in order to have a robust hub for their IT services and enable the future digital strategic plans.

Phil Turnock, ICT Shared Services Director at NHS Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire & Luton ICT Shared Services says, ‘A key focus this year has been to… add value in using technology to enable services at the point of care.’

‘One of our key challenges as a Shared Service has been to address the lack of investment in the service over the past years, to this end we have been very successful in securing centralised funding to re-design our core infrastructure, which once deployed, will transform our service provision from ‘fragile to agile’ and will play a significant part in delivering our digital strategies and the NHS 5 Year Forward View.’ http://www.hblict.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/HBL-ICT-Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf

The 5 Year Forward View will radically change the way services are delivered in the NHS. The proposal is for a new model of integrated care that will fundamentally transform the traditional boundaries in care, and to become ‘Paper-free at the Point of Care’.

The total redesign of the primary data centre work is set to commence next month and will begin with the stripping out of existing internal walls, doors, floor and ceiling within the ground floor proposed data centre space.

Following the construction of the physical room, the new energy efficient data centre will be built from the ground up, based around a hot aisle containment solution to fully separate hot and cold air paths. The project will include installation of the following equipment:

–    Network and server racks

–    Cooling

–    Power via PDUs and UPS

–    Fire detection and suppression

–    Raised access floor

–    iMeter environmental monitoring solution

–    DCIM Sensorium software

After the proposed programme of works has been completed, HLC ICT will have a highly resilient N+1 solution with contingency for loss of power to the building, loss of cooling and any power interruptions. Its secure location will be protected from fire, with further resilience in the form of a back-up generator.

Services within the primary data centre will be replicated across a 10mb resilient network connection to the secondary data centre providing a high level of redundancy within the room and further redundancy available at the backup site.

A full case study will be written on completion of the data centre build project.