Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust invests £5m to upgrade IT infrastructure

Editorial Type: News Date: 2020-07-01 Views: 254 Tags: Networking, VDI, Hyper-convergence, NHS, IGEL
The trust has updated its end-user computing (EUC) environment using IGEL

IGEL, provider of the next gen edge OS for cloud workspaces, announces today that Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has updated its end-user computing (EUC) environment, implementing IGEL OS and UD3 endpoints throughout the organisation.

This is part of a £5 million investment the Trust is making to replace and refresh its entire IT infrastructure including compute, storage, WAN/LAN network and thin client platforms. This significant upgrade project is putting in place modern, class-leading technology to support the Trust, provide high quality clinical care and services for around 820,000 local residents.

Located in the Northeast of Manchester, Pennine Acute Hospitals serves the communities of Bury, Rochdale and Oldham along with surrounding towns and villages. Employing 10,000 staff, it operates four hospitals: Fairfield General Hospital, North Manchester General Hospital, Royal Oldham Hospital and Rochdale Infirmary.  

As part of the overall project, the necessity to change the EUC platform was pressing. Pennine Acute Hospital's existing thin client solution was already a decade old, over 2,000 hardware devices were end-of-life and no longer supported; and it had a requirement to expand the use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and thin clients across the organisation. To complicate matters, the devices couldn't be centrally or easily controlled because the server-based management software was not up-to-date.  

Jav Yaqub, the Trust's head of infrastructure, explains, "The upshot was we were consuming a huge amount of time trying to maintain and run our thin client desktops, with major platform mismatches hindering our ability to roll out new operating systems like Windows 10 or deploy Office 365, which was crucial as NHS Digital has mandated that Windows 7 be removed from all desktops."  

After a successful trial, the decision was made to select IGEL for the new EUC solution. In tandem, the Trust updated its entire compute systems in its datacentre installing a Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure platform as well as Dell EMC network attached Isilon, Data Domain and ECS storage.  

The new VxRail compute platform is also used to host VMware Horizon – the Trust's VDI solution – with 3,000 IGEL OS licenses and 500 new IGEL UD3 endpoints purchased, along with IGEL's management software, the Universal Management Suite (UMS). IGEL Cloud Gateway was acquired to centrally manage endpoints not on the corporate network. Furthermore, NVIDIA virtual GPU technology is being trailed within the VxRail environment to share graphics power and capability across the VDI estate.