Moonwalk™ Inc. announced today that the Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (the L&D), in Luton, UK, has deployed Moonwalk™ software as an information management solution for their Novell Netware environment. Moonwalk™ software proactively manages the migration, copying and movement of data throughout the network, and minimizes risk by providing disaster recovery capabilities.

The L&D Hospital is a medium-sized general hospital that provides a comprehensive range of medical and surgical services for more than 300,000 people in Luton, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and parts of Buckinghamshire, and is projected to expand to serve 500,000 patients over the next ten years. Implementing the Moonwalk™ technology provides the L&D with a greatly enhanced, unified approach to data management today, and a framework for ongoing improvement in the future thanks to its extensive scalability.

As part of the UK's National Health Service (NHS), the L&D Hospital is bound by the Data Protection Act of 1998, rules of patient confidentiality, as well as the Freedom of Information Act, requiring managers like Keith Bringloe, Technical Operations Manager, to store more and more data on NetWare file servers – commonly a very large number of small files.

While the L&D Hospital has multiple terabytes of data across all its systems, the half terabyte on its NetWare servers proved to be more of a challenge than many vendors could manage.

"All clinical applications are mission-critical in a hospital setting, but in operational terms, email and user filestores are the ones that are most visible if there is a failure," said Bringloe. "Moonwalk™ is enabling us to rationalize and manage storage more effectively, reduce the backup window, and improve data management, as well as accountability and reporting in the Novell Netware environment. We anticipate being able to reallocate data storage, as well as a significant amount of valuable human resource’s time, effectively and efficiently."

"Information management in a hospital environment presents us with unique ways to demonstrate Moonwalk™’s software capability to not only protect and serve data, but to help IT administrators understand how, when, and by whom that data is used," said Moonwalk™ CEO Peter Harvey. “The L&D is able to control hospital data according to very granular criteria such as age, size, location, file type, file name, file creator and even more precise metadata for improved cost efficiencies, increased data security, intelligent storage allocation, and less bloated systems."

Moonwalk™ customers such as the L&D Hospital appreciate the innovative way Moonwalk™ software protects their data and reduces backup loads by automatically moving data from primary storage to lower-cost devices according to user-defined rules and policies.

Moonwalk™’s stateless architecture requires no additional overhead and is completely transparent to users and applications, with no introduced points of potential failure and ensuring maximum performance.

Extremely small-footprint agents, each with its own NFS client, are installed on enterprise servers to execute the policies as scheduled from a centralized management location. The software is so non-disruptive that it takes only about an hour for an average Moonwalk™ installation to be fully operational.

“Moonwalk™ software was simple to install, set up and configure,” said Bringloe. “It is intuitive to use and can manage other data and storage platforms, such as Windows, NAS, or SAN if we require this in the future. The interaction from the user’s perspective is seamless. Anyone using NetWare file stores and having data management problems, or just looking for a data management system that is simple to install and use, and costeffective,then they should look at Moonwalk™.”

About the L&D
The L&D is a medium size general hospital with 500 inpatient beds. The hospital provides a comprehensive range of general medical and surgical services for more 300,000 people. The L&D has developed some specialist services including cancer, obesity, neurophysiology and oral maxillofacial (jaw) surgery and has the responsibility for treating the most premature babies across the whole of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. The L&D features one of the country’s largest breast screening centers and provides a limb fitting service. The L&D employs 3,400 people and has an annual budget (in 2005/06) of £140 million. In August 2006 The L&D became a National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust. NHS Foundation Trusts are a completely new kind of organization focusing on public benefit, local administration, and local accountability.
More information can be found at www.ldh.nhs.uk.