Lincolnshire hospitals trust unveils new £1m ‘state-of-the-art’ data centre

United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust has invested more than £1 million in a new data centre to store its digital information more securely and quicker.

ULHT say the new centre, which is now operational, is in addition to the existing data centres to increase overall storage capacity.

Director of Finance and Digital, Paul Matthew, officially opened the new centre. He said: “Members of our Digital Services Team, supported by other colleagues, have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to create this new state-of-the-art hub that will benefit patients and almost every single colleague across the trust.

“The Digital Services Team could not have done their part, without the support of our Estates, Procurement and Finance Teams, as well as external partners. It really has been a brilliant team effort.”

ULHT has hospitals at Lincoln, Grantham and Boston and the data centre is based at one of these hospitals but the Trust has not disclosed its exact location due to security reasons.

The new data centre:

• Has the capacity to have at least 300 virtual servers.
• Has one petabyte of fast storage and two petabytes of backup storage – one petabyte of storage is equivalent to 500 billion of pages of standard text.
• Had 33.6 miles of fibre cabling installed, taking a massive 3,360 person hours.
• Has an efficient ‘hot aisle’ air conditioning system that maintains the temperature in the room.
• Had 20 contractors plus sub-contractors involved due to the expertise needed.
• Can extinguish a fire in 30 seconds without damaging any of the other kit and enabling the centre to keep on running.
• Has 200 amps of power along with a backup generator.
• Has an uninterruptable power supply that can last 40 minutes without any other support.

The trust is also investing in a new electronic prescribing and medicines administration system, as well as electronic patient records and other digital projects that are, according to the trust, going to be transformative in the future care of patients.

Paul added: “As we continue our ‘Going Digital’ journey, it is essential that we have the best systems in place to support all of the hard work that is going on across the trust. It is not only about having a new data centre to support our existing infrastructure, but also making sure that we have the capacity in the future and that every possible safety measure is in place so that it is as resilient as it can possibly be.”