Objective
Achieve high availability and safet y of
critical patient records by implementing
a reliable and performant data
storage solution
Approach
Used market knowledge, vendor
consultations and demonstrations to
find a partner who could understand
the challenges, identif y solutions, test
and prove those platforms and then
support them
Case Study
EMIS safeguards the storage
of 39 million patient records
HPE 3PAR Storage and HPE Proactive Care
ensure 24x7 availability of healthcare service
IT Matters
• Achieves more than the 99.95 per cent
availability demanded by HSCIC
• Safeguards the security and
confidentiality of 39 million
patient records
• Supports up to 50,000
concurrent users
Business Matters
• Ensures that EMIS can continue
to operate under its GP System of
Choice contract
• Provides a scalable solution that will
support business growth
• Continues to deliver a vital and trusted
service to the UK healthcare sector
EMIS holds 39 million
patient records which must
be constantly available
to doctors at 5,000 UK
practices. Stringent Health
and Social Care Information
Centre (HSCIC) service
levels demand zero data
loss and 99.95 per cent
availability with significant
financial penalties for
failure. To ensure the high
availability and performance
of its business critical system
EMIS uses HPE 3PAR
Storage backed by HPE
Proactive Care support.
Challenge
Stringent SLAs
When you sit down for a consultation, one of
the first things the doctor does is to call up
your medical records on the computer. You
may think that the files reside at the surgery
but if you’re in the UK, there’s a reasonable
chance that they’re located at a company
called EMIS, in the Yorkshire city of Leeds.
EMIS data centres host more than 39 million
patient records for approximately 5,000
medical practices and with a 53 per cent
share, it’s the undisputed market leader.
At anyone time, up to 50,000 General
Practitioners (GPs) access the records
securely across N3, which is the national
broadband network for the English National
Health Service. Data is available on a
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model
and the service is called EMIS Web.
Case study
EMIS
“HPE 3PAR just has to work because being without it creates a very
– Phil Webb, chief technology oicer, EMIS
Industry
Healthcare
high risk to our business. We’ve had no issues and that’s worth its
weight in gold.”
Page 2
High availability and data security are vital
issues so it’s no surprise that companies in
this market are strictly governed by HSCIC.
Contracts are awarded under the HSCIC GP
System of Choice (GPSoC) process which
demands zero data loss and 99.95 per cent
service availability - and there are risks of
significant financial charges if these Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) are not met.
One of a handful of companies to hold a
GPSoC contract, EMIS found itself in that
situation in 2011 when hundreds of GP
practices across England had diiculties
accessing its records. Many had to resort
to using paper records and EMIS had to
apologise and make recompense for failing
to meet its obligations.
The cause of that high-profile issue had
been failures in the company’s legacy SAN
storage system. EMIS chief technology
oicer Phil Webb, who joined the company
in 2012, explains: “The solution lacked
resiliency. If one component failed, the whole
unit went down; there were performance
issues, bottlenecks, card failures and high
disk failure rates.”
“The financial and reputational penalties
of failing to meet GPSoC SLAs are so
significant that if we had a catastrophic
failure we could, in theory, lose our entire
month’s service fees. To avoid that, we
needed a new SAN solution that would
ensure high availability and performance.”
Solution
Reliable and scalable
EMIS had a long-standing relationship
with Hewlett Packard Enterprise built on
the technology in its two geographically
dispersed data centres in Leeds which are
linked by multi 10 Gigabit and Gigabit fibres.
Both are resiliently connected to the N3
network and run in active/active mode so
uptime is automatically guaranteed, even in
the event of a failure. They are populated
with HPE BL460 blade servers across 58
c7000 enclosures; 11 discrete storage arrays
with 3868 disks, HPE SIM Integrated Lights
Out (iLO) monitoring and HPE Brocade
fabric switches.
99.95+ per cent system availability
Confidentiality of medical records is ensured
by role based access control with user
passwords or NHS smartcards. There is
also encryption between the client and
middle tier of the application. Firewalls
are in operation and everything is under
change control.
Case study
EMIS
Industry
Healthcare
Page 3
When looking for the new SAN solutions,
EMIS needed a partner who could
understand the challenges, identify
appropriate solutions, test and prove those
platforms and support them through the
transition. Three vendors were considered.
“Our main criteria were that the solution
should be reliable, flexible, manageable and
able to expand as our needs and data grow,”
says Webb. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise
had always been keen for us to look at their
storage and with the 3PAR acquisition it
made even more sense. Some of our people
went to the HPE Storage Labs in Germany
which is where the 3PAR came from and
extensive testing gave us confidence that
when issues were found, which is very
unlikely, we could rely on HPE to resolve
them for us.”
To meet current data storage needs of
approximately 100TB, EMIS has installed ten
HPE P10000 3PAR V800 Storage Systems
(five production and five for disaster
recovery) and an HPE 3PAR StoreServ
7400 storage base. As other legacy systems
reach end-of-line they will also be replaced
by 3PAR.
“We had a massive amount of help from
HPE,” adds Webb, “We had the initial
sessions in the labs in Germany and there
was knowledge transfer then configuration
and installation. HPE was there throughout,
helping us with it all.”
To ensure vital 24x7 availability, EMIS
storage is supported by an HPE Proactive
Care contract designed to reduce
unplanned downtime and resolve any
infrastructure problems.
Benefits
High availability and performance
“The biggest benefit for us is that the HPE
SAN allows us to meet our SLAs,” says
Webb. “We have had no issues with it and
that’s vital because we just cannot aord for
things to go wrong. With up to ten GPs per
practice and average consultations taking
ten minutes, it’s estimated that 300,000
consultations take place each hour. That
means 50,000 doctors using our systems
at any one time and if they can’t access the
records, then they can’t prescribe and we
face serious financial penalties.
“The systems are all working well. The
Health and Social Care Information Centre
and the GPs are happy and that’s down
to HPE. Our servers and the applications
that run on them are HPE; the disks that
data is stored on are HPE and some of
the networking is HPE. We need very fast
access and reliability and we get that with
HPE 3PAR because it’s so performant. It’s
massively more advanced than our old SAN
in terms of Input/Output Operations Per
Second (IOPS) and as long as it delivers
availability and speed, we’re happy.”
Case study
EMIS
Industry
Healthcare
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE P10000 3PAR V800
Storage Systems
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400
storage base
• HPE Brocade switches
Software
• HPE SIM Integrated Lights Out
(iLO) monitoring
• HPE services
• HPE Proactive Care
“HPE Proactive Care ensures that we meet the high
availability, performance and data security levels required
by the Health and Social Care Information Centre.”
– Phil Webb, chief technology oicer, EMIS
EMIS has also benefited from the dierent
levels of HPE 3PAR Storage. This has
enabled it to deploy a smaller system
in its Welsh operation that has to run
independently because Welsh patient data
has to be hosted in Wales.
Webb also appreciates HPE Proactive Care
support which ensures high availability of
vital systems: “The big thing for us is the
rapid assistance that HPE Proactive Care
gives us on the 3PAR equipment. With the
number of transactions that fly through our
systems, minutes are important and we have
dedicated numbers so we can get straight
through to specialists who can help us.”
“HPE 3PAR is a solution that we know and
trust. It has to work and not take up masses
of management time and that’s just what it
does.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/storage/sds
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© Copyright 2014, 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
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4AA5-4101EEW, March 2016, Rev. 1
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