Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust selects Tintri storage

Imperial College Healthcare NHS has deployed Tintri as a central piece in its virtualisation strategy. Since deployment, the UK Health Trust has seen notable benefits including increased storage performance and capacity, as well as a reduction of downtime and administration.  

Imperial College Healthcare NHS is one of the largest NHS trusts in England. It was formed in 2007 by the merger of Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary's NHS Trust with Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine. It is one of four major trauma centres in London, managing five hospitals in the capital, employing close to 10,000 people and treating more than a million patients each year.

Technology plays a key role in assisting the NHS—critical systems used 24/7 must have predictably fast performance. The Imperial College had begun the process of virtualising its server infrastructure but its enterprise SAN storage was not meeting performance and capacity requirements. IT staff were constantly tuning storage to maintain performance, drawing them away from higher impact projects. With close to 1,500 VMs, this represented a significant resource overhead.

After considering a number of alternative resolutions, the IT team at Imperial College deployed three Tintri systems. Immediately, the time spent managing storage dropped to near zero. The Tintri systems supported Imperial College’s workloads across both VMware and Hyper-V, shrinking their storage footprint. And Tintri’s VM-level quality of service controls allowed critical VMs to perform flawlessly at all hours of the day. As a result, Imperial College was able to re-deploy their SAN storage to focus on physical servers and file servers while Tintri managed their virtual estate.

Yusuf Mangera, technical architect at Imperial College Healthcare said, “The results have been remarkable. We haven’t had to look into any performance related problems at all. Tintri just works to the point where people have forgotten that the appliances even exist. I would certainly recommend Tintri to other people.”

“Imperial College Healthcare NHS is dedicated to providing the highest quality service to its patients—IT infrastructure needs to be an enabler, not a distraction,” commented Mark Young, VP Systems Engineering & Field CTO for EMEA at Tintri. “Tintri is designed to automate processes and streamline performance, ideal for organisations such as Imperial College that have a virtualisation strategy and a need for IT that simply works.”