Our data centres are fast - providing instant access to data

EMIS data centre hosted solutions

EMIS offers a fully hosted data centre for individual practices or PCT wide health care settings, covering community specialties as well as GP practices.

Our data centres are fast - providing instant access to data. Our data centres achieve significant performance levels and use the latest Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies to provide our customers with the highest possible standards of service at all times.

EMIS is the largest supplier of primary care hosted systems in the UK and is responsible for:

• hosting data for several hundred practices across 13 fully hosted managed services solutions across the country. In addition we support a further half a dozen locally hosted systems
• hosting in excess of 2,000,000 healthcare records
• consultations which have exceeded 1,000,000 this year. These figures are increasing significantly month on month

Performance

EMIS consistently over achieves against performance targets, both at individual PCT level and on averages across all systems. These performance targets include, transaction response times, system availability and service response times. The average percentage achieved for the last quarter was 99.83%, which is 4.83% over and above agreed performance indicators.

Benefits of an EMIS hosted system

Location of data centres - speed is not an issue

• fast performance - the EMIS data centres are connected to the N3 network using dedicated 'N3 data centre links'
• assurance of high quality service - N3 data centre links are contractually bound to ensure that the latency from the EMIS data centres to the core of the N3 network is less than <10ms, according to the BT N3 service level agreements. Latency on N3 is the time taken, measured in milliseconds, for a 64 byte packet to travel from an N3 source to a destination within N3 and back again (i.e. round trip time)
• geographical location is not an issue - all practices will receive the same response times from the EMIS data centres to the N3 core regardless of their geographical location throughout the country. This service level agreement (SLA) figure is the same nationwide and N3 are bound by it nationwide

BS7799 standard

In today's competitive business environment, information is constantly under threat from many sources. These can be internal, external, accidental, or malicious. With the increased use of new technology to store, transmit, and retrieve information, businesses are all open to increased numbers and types of threats.

EMIS is fully accredited to the BS7799 information security standard and all our data storage and management procedures and processes adhere to these standards. BS7799 includes:

• a comprehensive set of controls comprising best practices in information security
• an internationally recognised and accepted set of guidelines for security of information

Business continuity

EMIS data centres comprise two physically separate hosting locations approximately 10 miles apart, which operate from two physically different exchanges. This eliminates a single point of failure should a certain exchange be taken out, for instance in the event of a system exchange failure. These are fully protected with biometric security.

System continuity is maintained by a number of different technologies. These methods have been selected as the best means to protect either the data or application availability, i.e. not only is data protected by mirroring at a second location but all application equipment is also duplicated.

Storage area network (SAN)

EMIS data centres are run using the highest industry standard storage area network (SAN) configuration, on which EMIS stores data. The SAN is a large array of disks that mirror all data to a second SAN at a separate location. When data is filed at the first location, a copy of that data is filed simultaneously at a second location (mirrored) as it is added or changed. Should there be a problem at the first location, the data is still safe at the second location.

Other SAN benefits:

• enhanced performance on SAN infrastructure, i.e. data is written to very fast cache memory, then committed to disk. This cache is backed up and duplicated within the SAN as well as being written to a safe vault area to ensure maximum data integrity and safety
• online upgrades for disk space and performance tuning so the system doesn't have to be taken down for essential upgrades
• faster backup time over SAN fabric to maximise performance over other equivalent infrastructures
• instantaneous data copying to secondary location to improve business continuity
• external connections via N3 on a 10mb connection which is resilient and mirrored at the secondary location
• as well as this, there is a separate tape backup procedure (as per BS779 standards), which provides high speed, off site tape storage of all data on the SAN

Further information

For further information, on EMIS data centre hosted solutions, please contact Field Operations on 0845 123 4455 or fieldoperations@e-mis.com.