About the project
St Helier Hospital in Carshalton, Surrey, is part of the Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust. Serving over 400,000 residents the hospital provides a full range of medical and specialist services including a busy 24-hour accident and emergency department.
Following a successful bid under the NHS framework agreement, Keysource was commissioned to plan and manage the installation of a new UPS and electrical infrastructure within a live data centre that supports the mission critical IT and hospital services.
In addition Keysource deployed a DCIM software tool to improve performance, resilience and future capacity planning.
Major NHS hospitals such as St Helier have a substantial and growing reliance on a wide range of IT services, many of which are critical for patient care.
St Helier’s data centre had grown organically over the years and the existing UPS needed upgrading to meet current and future needs, together with an overall improvement of the surrounding environment.
The immediate challenge was to ensure that the IT equipment supporting the A&E and other services remained unaffected throughout the upgrade. With proven, award winning experience with delivering upgrades within live critical environments, we were able to develop and plan an approach which ensured that the existing UPS operation was maintained whilst the new UPS was installed.
As principal contractor on the project, Keysource designed and installed a new UPS and associated infrastructure, such as overhead containers for cabling, within the data centre. By delivering a modular UPS solution N+1 resilience can be delivered within the current environment, scalable from 80kW to 125kW. Keysource also consulted upon and implemented solutions in regards to rack layout and containment within the data centre itself.
The customer had begun a hot aisle containment system and Keysource built the UPS into that approach, assisting the customer in planning how that could be scaled in the future, as well as decommissioning and removing the old equipment. Keysource completed the project within six weeks with zero downtime.
Much of the existing power infrastructure at the data centre was undocumented, but by combining the new UPS installation with the implementation of a integrated DCIM solution, Keysource provided full sight of the assets, from the IT to the supporting infrastructure. Impact failure analysis and modelling can be undertaken to minimise the impact of any planned or unplanned events.
Armed with this full range of data from across the DC Estate, St Helier’s ICT department can undertake comprehensive capacity planning to ensure the facility runs as efficiently as possible.
Monitoring
A key ongoing requirement of the hospital’s estate management team was a toolset which would improve management and performance of the critical environment in order to ensure it remained fit for future needs.
After fully understanding the requirements and the customer’s needs, Keysource delivered a monitoring solution which provides comprehensive and reliable information on capacity and resilience. It also allows future changes to be planned and modelled to ensure all impacts are consider when evaluating options.
