NHS North East London lowers costs and improves efficiency with a switch to Nutanix
The North East London Integrated Care Board (NEL ICB) of the UK National Health Service (NHS) managed to leap legay hurdles and reduce spend and administrative overhead by shifting off legacy infrastructure to an all-new private cloud environment
Business need
NEL ICB plans and commissions public healthcare provision for a large area of the UK’s capital. It came into being in 2022 and, like many contemporary organisations created from a previous organisation, it faced disruption in moving away from legacy three-tier IT to a more modern approach. Risks and costs loomed large and it needed a more flexible setup with lower overheads and without technical debt.
It was a legacy NetApp environment with two datacentres and a lot of rack space consuming a lot of power and it was coming to end-of-life status. We built a business case to bring in Nutanix to transform and move our virtualised estate from VMware to AHV. There was a lot of cost saving to be had and operational overhead to remove. It had been a nightmare to manage and we wanted to move to a ‘single pane of glass’ for easier management, reduced overhead and simplified licensing.
Key results
Significantly reduced technical debt.
NEL ICB now has a modern environment with greater efficiency in terms of value, performance and with reported reductions in power consumption.
Single pane of glass.
Administration overhead is much reduced for operations and vendor management is streamlined.
Hardware simplification.
A dramatically reduced hardware estate means more IT control.
CHALLENGE
Newly created from a previous disbanded organisation, the NEL Commissioning Support Unit (NEL CSU) in 2022, the NEL ICB is responsible for healthcare spend and performance in a densely populated area of London. It has four key targets: creating meaningful work opportunities; improving community health; supporting young people; and making mental health care more easily accessible.
However, NEL ICB faced various technical challenges including the need for a more modern architecture, lower costs and improved performance than had been the case with the erstwhile three-tier NetApp- and VMware-heavy environment plus Rackspace hosted services. In short, NEL ICB had too many server racks across its two datacentres, too much work to do to maintain performant operations, and it was using too much power.
“I wanted to get away from VMware because there wasn’t much innovation going on and the costs were going through the roof,” said Neil Goodman, NEL ICB enterprise architect and transformation specialist.
SOLUTION
“It was an environment coming to the end of life,” said Goodman. “We created business cases to move away from that. I’d worked with Nutanix in other parts of the NHS and knew that we could avoid a lot of costs and admin overhead.”
The solution effectively meant taking out NetApp storage and VMware virtualisation including Horizon for virtual desktops, and replacing it all with Nutanix.
“Some people hadn't worked with hyperconverged infrastructure and had to be persuaded,” Goodman said. “But if you reduce costs and deliver better outcomes, that's a sensible argument for change. We had a quite intense six to nine months of building business cases but when I got the necessary data I could do the modelling and show the outcomes would work. It was a battle: some people might have given up on the arguing, but you have to go through that process.”
OUTCOMES
In all, NEL ICB moved from 22 NetApp nodes to just eight Nutanix nodes in two racks across its datacentres. Most general practitioner doctor facilities are now cloud-based rather than being dependent on VMware VDI. It also overhauled business continuity with what Goodman called a “night-and-day change that wasn’t possible before”. Staff have benefited from free Nutanix training and Goodman reports that all changes occurred without downtime impacting IT services.
“We had that Nutanix experience from other parts of the NHS,” said Phil Cook, Senior Infrastructure Manager at NEL ICB. “It’s well embedded in the NHS and the NHS was one of the biggest winners of the 2023 Broadcom acquisition of VMware that led to changes in product availability and pricing. The Broadcom acquisition was almost perfect for us because it just went to validate that everything we had done was on the right path, and it saved us money.”
Franz Esser, EMEA strategic business manager of NEL ICB partner ET Works, which helped with the deployment, concurred: “We waited a long time for a quote from VMware and then we found that we would have had to move to a higher SKU at a much higher cost.”
NEL ICB reports that the switch lowered its total cost of ownership and helped what had been “stretched” IT teams. “Bringing tech people into a new world and showing them the benefits of a Nutanix environment can be a hard sell, but my team has people that were resistant at the time but now love the new environment,” Goodman said. “We also benefit from licensing and vendor consolidation rather than dealing with multiple vendors … it’s much less painful on a daily basis.”
NEXT STEPS
NEL ICB now has a platform to make incremental improvements. According to Cook, “There’s a conversation about the strategy for NEL ICB and moving some data and services to the cloud through Microsoft OneDrive, Sharepoint or Teams. But there will always be a virtual server infrastructure we need to support. Whether we keep that on-prem or look at Nutanix NC2 in a cloud environment is to be decided. We may be able to reduce costs by having NC2 in Azure, for instance, which would help as our second datacentre is a distance away near Bristol.”
“There’s also a lot of push towards AI to do more with less,” said Cook,. “We have most of our corporate data in Nutanix Files Storage and I predict that we will move to a national cloud-based service, probably Microsoft, which means we get all the benefits of the NHS Cybersecurity Operations Centre.”
Cook adds: “We’re also looking at national funding programmes and national Azure zones as well as host-based microsegmentation. My view is that we should use public cloud only where appropriate. I don’t agree with cloud-first for everything. I think we have a good on-prem private cloud environment and a very strong partner in Nutanix.”
Partner
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4/2026
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