Domain & Messaging Upgrade - Barking Havering & Redbridge Hospitals NHS Trust
Background
Barking Havering & Redbridge Hospitals NHS Trust (BHR) serves a population of around 700,000, making it one of the largest acute hospital trusts in England. The Trust’s IT Department provides services for over 5,500 employees and healthcare partners in the North East London area.
Requirement
BHR needed to replace it’s existing legacy server infrastructure for messaging and domain infrastructure, to provide reliability and business continuity in the event of failure. The Trust also needed to ensure that new software and hardware were deployed to ensure efficiency and reliability of an updated solution to enable delivery of a high quality patient and public services.
Approach
The Trust chose BDS Solutions to consolidate the legacy server infrastructure onto new HP server hardware. In addition, BDS Solutions also provided consultancy for the migration of the Trust’s legacy NT4 domain to Windows 2003 Server Active Directory and the Trust’s legacy messaging service Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Server to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
Results
BDS Solutions delivered a technical design specification for a proposed infrastructure, assessment of migration options and recommended an approach which allowed the Trust to transition network resources to the new infrastructure during a staged migration. A key objective identified by the Trust was to minimise end-user disruption and risk to the business, while ensuring the projects outcome was not compromised.
Benefits Realised
The modernisation of the Trusts legacy server environment:
- strengthened security
- increased the availability of business critical applications
- reduced operational costs through a reduction in the administrative overhead associated with maintaining legacy systems
Strategic benefits provided by the introduction of the new architecture include a technology platform prepared to support future developments including the ability to accommodate additional directory-enabled applications.
Testimonial
"BDS Solutions have provided services to the Trust for some time, so their experience and skill base were known and made them a logical inclusion in the list of tenders for the Active Directory and Messaging work. Their quotation was both the most cost-effective and clearly structured of those received which gave confidence that the project would be well managed.
"The project was quite large, there were three main hospital sites each with their own Domain Controller and sundry smaller sites. There was also the need to incorporate a second separate domain in the same Forest to accommodate a specialist medical system.
"The migration to Active Directory and Exchange 2003 has now been successfully completed and went very smoothly. I am therefore confident that the Trust will continue it’s successful partnership with BDS Solutions and engage with them in appropriate future projects."
