About NHS Dentist
Dental IT was asked to look at a large, ten-surgery practice suffering with persistently poor performance and reliability issues, problems with backup and data loss and additional service issues. After previously working with two other major suppliers, the practice had been left at a loss with their IT systems and was in need of support.
IT Requirements
The network required a detailed audit that highlighted a number of major flaws. The network infrastructure was lacking, having evolved over the years with many added switches and extensions. Multiple servers had been installed with non-standard clustering configurations using amateur build generic servers, extremely low grade switches and iSCSI NAS devices with poor I/O capabilities. The backup system was simply not working at all.
The results
The practice has seen a huge improvement in their systems with no network downtime.
Major core outages and complete failures of the backup system have been completely removed from the practice.
Dental IT continues to handle all of the practice’s ongoing maintenance and IT management, changing spare machines, failed printers and scanners.
We also handle upgrades to the main software packages to ensure they are carried out safely.
Integrated Solutions
The size and scale of the practice determined a complete rebuild of the core network in order to ensure ‘always on’ IT systems. A total rewire of the practice was carried out alongside the current network, introducing a highly specified and well-built HP ProLiant rack-mounted server that was UPS backed, with SAS disks and hardware RAID, high end caching controller, plenty of RAM and Server 2008 64 bit.
Symantec System Recovery was used for imaging backup, and a secondary file backup came in the form of a tape backup system to a fast SAS Ultrium drive. After upgrading the Internet connectivity, we introduced a high end HP-managed switch and carried out migration works over a weekend to prevent downtime. The practice has some of the largest clinical databases in the country, which were all migrated without issue. All services were successfully running when the practice went ‘live’ with the new systems.
NHS Dentist
Have a project in mind?
Dental IT offer a free of charge, no commitment, remote audit to any dental practice. To contact us about this, or get a quote for support, or for any other enquiry, please complete this form and we will contact you back.