Connecting for Health (CfH), which runs the National
Programme for IT in the NHS, has ordered a review of disaster
recovery arrangements for all five of its local service providers
following failures at a datacentre run by CSC earlier this
month.
The outages left hospital trusts in the North West and West
Midlands without access to patient administration systems for up to
five days.
CfH contracts with local service providers specify that storage
area networks at the heart of disaster recovery provisions must
have no single point of failure, 99.9% availability and zero data
loss.
“The disaster recovery restored time within contracts depends
upon the services affected. This is currently between two and 72
hours. However, by January 2007, all services must be restored
within two to 12 hours,” said a CfH spokesman.
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