South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust selects Tintri

South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust provides an extensive range of quality health and social care services to 440,000 citizens of Northern Ireland.

“We used to just provide the bulk of our IT services to our hospitals,” explained Darren Henderson, ICT Services Manager for the Trust. “But the DHSSPS (Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety Northern Ireland) strategy of moving services out into the community and closer to where the patients are has totally transformed our IT requirements. We now have to provide remote access to all of the systems our health care professionals use on a much wider basis. Virtual desktops are an excellent way to provide mobility, but VDI introduces its own challenges to the IT environment. With VDI, you have to be very careful about your choice of storage platform.”

After discovering the shortcomings of their existing legacy storage solution and evaluating several storage platforms, the Trust chose Tintri, due to the ease of use and superior performance of the Tintri VM-Aware Storage. Henderson’s team was able to transfer their VMs over to the Tintri storage in just a few hours after spending only five minutes configuring the Tintri system.

The Trust has also deployed zero clients, single sign-on, and proximity readers to facilitate remote access. Trust staff can walk up to any device, swipe their ID cards, and login each morning in less than 13 seconds. As they move around the facilities, they can re-swipe their card on the nearest terminals. It takes an average of only 3.8 seconds to switch the session to the new device.

Henderson added, “We were absolutely blown away by the management simplicity of Tintri and the system performance is amazing.”

Amongst the first employees to try out VDI were those in the Trust’s emergency department, since they need the fastest access to information. “Since Tintri is an independent node, we don't have to ‘size for tomorrow’, we can buy just what we need for today, and expand as the need arises. With other solutions, we would have to buy a large, expensive frame up front, in addition to all of the disks needed to meet the performance requirements. Tintri is a much more scalable and cost effective solution for VDI,” noted Henderson.

“The ability to deliver mobility to users efficiently is enabled by VDI,”explained Geoff Stedman, VP of Marketing at Tintri. “But you must have a high performance and scalable storage platform to make VDI feasible. In that aspect, Tintri is the enabler for VDI, and VDI is the enabler for mobility.”