Luton and Dunstable NHS Trust

Luton, UK
Find out why this busy UK hospital chose Moonwalk to cope with the ever-growing volume of data across its systems. The Luton & Dunstable Hospital, UK
This busy UK hospital installed Moonwalk to more effectively manage the important medical records of its hundreds of thousands of patients.

Organisation overview.  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.  This is projected to expand to serve 500,000 patients over the next ten years.

Key requirements.  The L&D Hospital required an information management solution for their Novell Netware environment. As part of the National Health Service (NHS), the L&D Hospital is bound by the Data Protection Act of 1998, rules of patient confidentiality and the Freedom of Information Act. Compliance with the strict regulatory environment has resulted in an ever-increasing volume of data - large numbers of small files - being stored on the NetWare servers. The L&D Hospital were looking for an enhanced, unified approach to data management and a framework for improvement in the future.

Solution.  Installing Moonwalk software enabled L&D Hospital to rationalise and manage data storage more effectively and improve overall data management.  It also reduced backup loads.  This was achieved this through automatically moving data from primary storage to lower-cost devices, according to a set of user-defined rules and policies.  

L&D is now 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.

As Moonwalk can operate effective across any other data and storage platforms such as Windows, NAS or SAN, L&D Hospital are not locked into any fixed platform for future requirements.  

L&D Hospital's Technical Operations Manager, Keith Bringloe said, "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 cost-effective, then they should look at Moonwalk".