G Cloud Uk Meetup

Stuart McCaul, Director - EMEA, Basho Technologies

Saving lives, doing

business with

G-Cloud III

Stuart McCaul, Director - EMEA, Basho Technologies

Connect: @_stu_

2nd October 2013

Shhh!

• PR embargo until 8th October

The Big NHS Computer

• Keep a record of non-clinical information about every one who is treated by the NHS

• Allow the NHS to run off the NHS Number

• Keep a record for every prescription made by a GP

• And manage its state changes from Prescribe to Payment

• Keep a record of everyone’s current medication and adverse reactions

• And make it available when clinically necessary

• Over 20,000 integrated endpoints

• Over 500 (complex) messages per second

• A “zero data loss” requirement and a 99.9% availability requirement

The Problem

Failure

Riak – good for what?

• Protecting our data

• Through replication

• Through eventual consistency

• Through siblings

• Consistency of performance of Key-Value operations

• We know how many disk seeks are involved in each operation

• It defers activity to smooth performance

• Scaling by adding more nodes

• Disk space

• Volume

• Commodity hardware

Riak – good for what?

• The replacement Spine

• Can hit greater volumes

• With up to 90% reduction in response times

• With 99th percentile response times at or below

previous average

• .... with <5% of the hardware costs

• This is in part about allowing us to be lazy about fixing

• And making it easier to recover from failure

• Expecting to save over 200 QALY per annum just on

infrastructure

Riak – good for what?

• “In short: using Riak to insure high data availability helps

avoid health risks and in the worst case, patient death.”

- Martin Sumner, NHS HSCIC

The deal

Procurement surprises

• NHS -> DH -> Cabinet -> DH -> NHS

• 9 Signatories on PO

• DH signed G-Cloud form

• G-Cloud / Basho framework agreement was

reviewed by lawyers at NHS and DH

• 2 year maximum contract

• Process took 3 months

Questions?