Anthony Nolan
Robust and secure Private Cloud infrastructure across 3 London sites.
Implementing a private Cloud and VPLS solution enables a future-proofed, scalable infrastructure. This ensures Anthony Nolan's data is accessible and available at all times so that people with blood cancer have the best chance of finding a match.
About Anthony Nolan
Anthony Nolan, now in its 40th anniversary year, was the world's first bone marrow register. The blood cancer charity has been saving lives for four decades by matching remarkable people willing to donate their bone marrow to patients in desperate need of a transplant.
Anthony Nolan operates an extensive global database of over 500,000 bone marrow, or stem cell, donors. This database enables the charity to provide over 1,000 blood cancer patients with a matching stem cell donor every year.
Solution
Anthony Nolan decided to migrate its existing infrastructure, previously housed in its headquarters in London, to two data centre sites operated by Exponential-e in London. Key to the solution is improving business continuity through migrating the servers to these sites and therefore into dedicated off-site facilities.
Anthony Nolan chose to adopt Exponential-e's VPLS into the solution, Exponential-e's Tier 3 facilities have enterprise-class connectivity provided over a Network built and integrated for 100% uptime.
By connecting over Exponential-e's virtual private LAN, Anthony Nolan is also able to extend its own Network to capture all of its offices on one private WAN. The Network also provides dual resilience enabling further contingency and security.
Our database is accessed 24 hours a day and is essential in ensuring people with blood cancer have the best chance of finding a match. We need to ensure our data is safe, accessible and available at all times, now and in the future. As we continue growing year on year this demand is only increasing and we need to ensure we have the ability to expand our capacity in the future.
Marcin Fabjanczyk Infrastructure Manager, Anthony Nolan
Challenges
With over 60,000 new donors registering per year, the rapid growth of the organisation and the volume of data it processes, means it is essential for Anthony Nolan to safeguard the management of its data to ensure business continuity. Registries across the world access the database 24 hours a day looking for a potential donor match for people with blood cancer.
If the database is not available or accessible, registries are not able to access it and this critical activity cannot take place.
Whilst the database must be constantly available, it also needs to be scalable. Anthony Nolan has a number of agreements with other donor databases, which are set to be incorporated into the same infrastructure - the set-up must be resilient enough to support this growth in data and the associated search requests.
In addition to this growth, the charity has targets to increase the rate of growth of registered donors, and is currently on track to achieve its target of 60,000 new donors every year. Its infrastructure must support this planned growth long-term.
Solution benefits
- Implemented private Cloud and VPLS solution.
- Future-proofed and scalable infrastructure.
- Business continuity through both Cloud and Network infrastructure.
- Data is always secure and private, across its own WAN and Exponential-e Tier 3 facilities.
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