Royal College of General Practitioners Chose NetApp

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) is the professional
membership body for family doctors (GPs) in the UK and abroad. Strongly committed
to improving patient care, clinical standards and GP training. The body was
founded in 1952 and supports its 42,000 members on key issues including
licensing, education, training, research and clinical standards. It is the
largest of the medical royal
colleges, the bodies that help underwrite professional standards in the UK healthcare
profession.

The Challenge:
Ask Andy Smith, Head of IT at the College, about the
business problem he was facing and you get a very direct answer: he had no
strategy as he had no IT: "Until we started to get a grip on the situation,
I think it’s fair to say our IT architecture was in no way rationalised; we had
disparate systems all over the place that responded passively to needs. It just
wasn’t well organised. But in recent years, and quite rightly in my view, the
Baby Boomer generation started demanding more and more from us as a membership
organisation and our technology platform just wasn’t able to effectively
respond. There was a lack of cohesion and spending was happening in too much of
an ad hoc way, in my opinion. All in all our operational capability was not fit
for purpose and I needed to change that, radically."

The Solution:
In response, Andy Smith has led a complete overhaul of
the College’s IT stack, from server to desktop to website. After
evaluation of all the options, which included using external consulting
expertise, as well as leveraging his own experiences from previous ICT
leadership roles, Andy Smith selected technology solutions specialist and
NetApp, Inc. partner Vohkus, as supplier. Vohkus worked with RCGP
through the summer of 2010 to implement and deploy a NetApp solution.

The Result:
Using the power of virtualisation, Vohkus implemented
a NetApp storage and disaster recovery solution, with VMware software. This
created what Andy Smith and his team characterise as "going from a passive
to highly proactive IT structure that’s resilient and highly available". According to Andy Smith, "Flexible is genuinely
the best word to describe what we’ve now got."

Business Benefits:
Vohkus worked closely with RCGP to deliver a
platform that included the installation of a new network in the data centre and
migration of the entire estate from physical to virtual, over an eight-week
period, during the summer of 2010. Vohkus installed two NetApp FAS2040 systems
located in two data centres, using Snapmirror to replicate between them. During
the installation, the team met a challenge to complete the rebuild as part of
an office relocation, which added pressure. Fortunately deadlines were kept,
much to Andy Smith’s relief.

Specifically, the NetApp partner Vohkus helped
consolidate over 40 servers down to 6 that are now highly partitioned, as well
as enabling consolidation of data and rationalisation of storage using
the de-duplication feature that SMEs cite as one of the most unsung
benefits of the NetApp solution suite. The new storage core has been made
business continuity-friendly with 2 data centres being set up and constantly
refreshed and data protected, while other benefits have included a new printer
strategy. The solution has enabled RCGP to reduce the number of peripherals
from 100 to less than 10 as well as provide the capability for hot desking and
other forms of flexible working, allied with a move to IP-based telephony as
another way to add value and service to members.

If asked, how would Andy Smith sum up the main
achievement and benefit to users? "I’d say it was consistency. They can
now be confident they can get the right data and the right applications
wherever and however they want to work."

Going forward, Andy Smith says that now he has this
scalable platform in place, he has the toolset he can to cope with any
aspiration of the rest of his business and an ability to match any such
requirement to boot. "They can throw me as hard a curveball as they
like now – as they tend to," he jokes. "But I know I can cope with
it. Flexible is genuinely the best word to describe
what we’ve now got."