HP simplifies IT and supports move to Cloud for Egton Medical Information Systems

Egton Medical Information Systems (EMIS) has selected HP Converged Systems to save time and costs while supporting its move to a hybrid cloud IT infrastructure. An HP ConvergedSystem 700x will enable EMIS to rapidly and cost-effectively improve its internal systems by delivering 15 service upgrades across the business in one go instead of having to carry out projects one at a time.

EMIS’ data centers host more than 40 million patient records for approximately 5,000 medical practices, which can be securely accessed by up to 50,000 GPs at any one time. The company already safeguards the security and confidentiality of patient records with HP 3PAR Storage and HP ProLiant blade servers in its production environment, and wanted to upgrade its test and development systems.

“Most of our work involves heavily bespoke designs tailored per customer, and it can be hard to prioritise upgrades for our own internal systems,” says Phil Webb, chief technical officer, EMIS. “The HP ConvergedSystem 700x enables us to buy HP’s market-leading server, storage and networking technologies in a single pre-configured appliance – and have it deployed on-site within 30 days. We specified the high-level functionality we needed and left HP to get on with the low-level design, which massively reduced time to production and saved our design team two months of set-up time. In addition, HP supports our objective of moving to a software-defined data center environment.”

The HP ConvergedSystem 700x running Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 will enable EMIS to implement a public and private cloud environment at the same time as building its own community platform and other clinical systems. With HP OneView infrastructure management already configured in, it will improve productivity for EMIS’ IT team while reducing costs by simplifying the most common data center processes such as deployment, updating, migrating and troubleshooting. HP OneView will eventually be expanded out to the whole data center.

As well as providing a secure multi-tenant private cloud platform for multiple internal systems, the HP ConvergedSystem 700x reduces the risks associated with IT complexity and ensures performance and availability while helping to control expenditure. To ensure five 9s availability, HP also provides EMIS with a single integrated firmware platform for the end-to-end hardware environment, with proactive monitoring and 4-hour onsite response 24x7.

“A New Style of IT is emerging in which organisations must quickly deliver next-generation applications and web services to drive business growth and competitive differentiation,” says Angela Cross, Head of Industry Standard Servers and Converged Systems at HP UK. “HP Converged Systems help companies like EMIS achieve this by reducing IT complexity and costs while increasing application performance.”