Royal Bournemouth and Poole NHS Trusts Modernise Their SQL Server Database Environments

“Northdoor helped us to clearly understand what our migration options are from a SQL Server environment design and licensing perspective. Their work has helped us to minimise costs and enabled us to make the right decisions with regard to selecting the most appropriate SQL Server licensing model and environment migration path for the future.”

The Challenge

Bournemouth & Christchurch and Poole NHS Trusts wanted to modernise their SQL Server database environments to future proof the performance of its critical applications, to best serve the Hospital Trusts. It had sprawling legacy SQL Server environments running old versions of SQL on numerous dedicated and shared servers across multiple sites. The cost to maintain, manage and license the environment was becoming overly time consuming and expensive.

The Northdoor Solution

• Workshop to understand the short, medium and future demands of the database environments for both Trusts
• Comprehensive audit and performance monitoring of the environments
• Developed best practice environment & licensing design options

Northdoor undertook a workshop with the Trusts stakeholders to understand the database environment requirements which included evaluating performance, workload trends, back-ups, DR, licensing, security, consolidation, capacity flexibility, migrations to newer versions of SQL. Northdoor then offered  SQL server consulting and audited the existing environments of both Trusts and ran performance monitoring software to capture existing workload trends. Once that information had been obtained, Northdoor were able to generate appropriate environment and associated licensing designs based on those requirements.

Benefits

• Reduction in estate size via consolidation resulting in reduced management time and costs
• Better performance due to workload balancing and tuning
• New feature and product utilisation such as Always-on via migrations to newer versions and or editions of SQL
• Better security & compliance alignment due to newer versions of SQL being supported by Microsoft
• Reduced license costs