Brocade E7Y24A Product Data Sheet

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 oicer, 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 diiculties
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
oicer 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.