The Client
The NHS was launched in 1948. It was born out of a long-held ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth – a principle that remains at its core.
With the exception of some charges, such as prescriptions, optical and dental services, the NHS in England remains free at the point of use for anyone who is a UK resident. That is currently more than 64.1 million people in the UK and 53.9 million people in England alone.
The NHS in England deals with over 1 million patients every 36 hours. It covers everything from antenatal screening and routine screenings such as the NHS Health Check and treatments for long-term conditions, to transplants, emergency treatment and end-of-life care.
The Brief
Having previously carried out multiple successful relocations for one of the NHS’s IT support companies and a long-term partner of Ace IT Relocation’s on projects of a similar scale, they contacted Ace IT Relocation because of this previous relationship and our reputation for maintaining uptime at critical times. Informing us we were the most cost-effective solution among competitors at the same time.
The Relocation
Although the project was a smaller scale than most, we approach every project with the same professionalism and as such assigned one of our Project Managers to work with the Project Manager at The NHS. As the equipment being migrated was located in a server room within the hospital in Gloucestershire it was clear timings for this project would have to be stringent.
Detailed move schedules were agreed and rack diagrams were designed to plan where each server would be installed back into the racks.
The project had a start time of 04.00 hours on a Saturday, The NHS choosing a time that was most convenient for them as we accommodate all customers firstly understanding how stressful these projects are and the fact Ace IT Relocation does not charge an additional cost for an out of hours service.
All equipment was powered down by the client before Ace IT Relocation arrived onsite, our server engineers de-racked each rack mountable infrastructure from the server rack. Each bit of server, storage and network devices were expertly wrapped in anti-static bubble wrap protection to avoid static discharging and placed in purpose built anti-static foam lined server flight cases. Ace IT Relocation’s engineers then secured each flight case with unique tamper evident seals for additional security.
The distance between the 2 sites was less than 10 miles but due to the mission critical nature of this server relocation, Ace IT Relocation provide the NHS with all the details to log on to our unique GPS tracking system present on all our vehicles for all IT Relocation and Data Centre Relocation projects. Once all rack mountable infrastructure had been relocated successfully our server engineers re-racked all infrastructure in accordance with the rack diagrams provided
Result
Knowing the importance, The NHS offers all UK residents 24 hours a day 7 days a week maintaining uptime for their services was paramount. With our experience, professional engineers, and thorough project management The NHS suffered no interruption to services at any point of the project.
Feedback
Ace IT Relocation – We are proud firstly that an organisation of The NHS’s magnitude had so much confidence involving Ace in such a mission critical project. We are also proud that we were able to assist a close partner with one of their largest customers without any issue.
Testimonial
Thank you for your services last weekend. I was impressed with how smoothly everything went and the level of services you can offer within your server relocation services. We found the security seals and GPS tracking very useful. Thanks again.
