CASE STUDY: MID CHESHIRE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATIONS TRUST

Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (MCHFT) provides good quality, safe and effective healthcare to the people of Cheshire and beyond.

The Trust, which manages Leighton Hospital in Crewe, Victoria Infirmary in Northwich, and Elmhurst Intermediate Care Centre in Winsford, was established as an NHS Trust in April 1991 and became a Foundation Trust in April 2008.

They employ almost 5,500 members of staff, have 540 hospital beds, with a range of services including accident and emergency, maternity, outpatients, therapies, and children’s health.

THE CHALLENGE

MCFHT had a large quantity of CIFS data, accessed by circa 8000 clients, residing on NetApp storage devices and mirrored across two locations. This hardware was nearing end of life and required replacement, but they were also looking to improve their site redundancy and failover capability and increase their NetApp data security.

Whilst MCFHT were running client-side antivirus and malware software, they needed a storage specific software in place to provide an additional layer of security.

THE SOLUTION

Bytes partnered with Simplify IT - a trusted, highly skilled partner with the right engineers and experience to deliver the deployment and support that MCHFT required.

New NetApp controllers were procured by MCHFT, and Simplify IT worked with Bytes and MCHFT to ensure that these were deployed following NetApp best practise and in a way that worked best for the customer. 

The main improvement over the existing NetApp deployment was to introduce the use of NetApp SVM-DR technology. This was configured to provide a simple failover method in the event of an incident at their primary site - SVM-DR was used to mirror all the data and the CIFS configuration at the primary site over to the secondary site and provides the ability to failover with only a few clicks and minimal downtime.

In addition to the NetApp deployment, it was recommended that MCHFT consider additional ransomware protection for their data. The product that was recommended and deployed was Prolion Cryptospike.

Cryptospike provides advanced ransomware protection for NetApp CIFS data, using a combination of block lists and anomaly detection to identify potential ransomware attacks and then utilises NetApp Snapshot technology to protect and restore the data, providing granular restore capability down to single files.

THE OUTCOME

The use of NetApp SVM-DR has removed the manual processes that would have been required in the event of failure or loss of the primary site, as well as greatly reducing the period of downtime that would occur in the event of failover being required.

The deployment of Prolion Cryptospike has improved the security of the data stored on the NetApp controllers, whilst at the same time providing a complete picture of how the data is currently being accessed via the built-in file analytics functionality.