Secure I.T. Environments Completes 80-mile Data Centre Migration Over a Weekend for Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust

An efficiently executed migration under COVID-19 safety measures, maintaining key services and data replication with no loss of connectivity.

1 December 2020 – London, UK – Secure I.T. Environments Ltd, one of the UK’s leading design and build companies for modular, containerised and micro data centres, has today announced that it has completed a data centre migration project for the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT), moving equipment and assets across a carefully choreographed weekend between sites 80 miles apart in Bedford and Colchester.

The project involved moving several cabinets and SAN equipment from Clapham in Bedfordshire to a new location prepared by the EPUT I.T. teams at a site in Colchester. The project was carefully planned during lockdown restrictions over a series of Microsoft Teams meetings. Taking place over a weekend, equipment was carefully labelled, removed, transported, cleaned and reconnected at the new site ready for the Trust IT projects team to test and take live on the Monday morning.

Secure I.T. Environments also worked closely with the trust IT projects team to ensure that connectivity was maintained for a number of key services through the existing Bedfordshire data centre while the migration took place. This included the configuration of network services to provide local fibre connectivity, WAB connectivity to the Trust Media Business EtherVPN network and WAN services via N3/HSCN. A remote access VPN service was included in the migration, as well as a point-to-point connection between the new data centre in Colchester and the trust’s primary data centre in Grays, Thurrock to maintain consistent data replication services post migration.

Janette Leonard, Director of IT at EPUT said, “Our migration went smoothly and we went live in the new location as planned on the Monday morning. Thanks to the careful planning of Trust IT projects and estates teams, working in close partnership with Secure I.T. Environments, we were able to plan for the challenges of working on a tight timeline, while maintaining a COVID-safe working environment.”

Jo-Anne Garvie, Commercial Director at Secure I.T. Environments added, “This was an interesting project for us, assisting with the planning of this migration process. Thanks go to the project team at EPUT, who played a key role in enabling an extremely well organised transition with no delays or connectivity issues. An extremely professionally executed project by all involved including our supporting partners.”