The Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, UK, is set to demolish its data center.
The move is part of a £750m ($946.7m) modernization program at the hospital, and will also see several other buildings torn down.
In total, the hospital is demolishing half a dozen buildings as well as the data center. These include the Barry Building, which first opened in 1828 and is the oldest working hospital building in the NHS; the Nigel Porter Unit; and the ENT building, followed by the Hanbury Building.
The data center will be the third facility to be demolished. Details on its size and IT capacity have not been shared.
In their place, the hospital will build a cancer treatment center.
Dr Findlay, the trust's chief executive, said: “Over the next few months, the old hospital estate and surrounding buildings will be carefully dismantled and a revised planning application submitted for the £155 million ($195.66m) new center. It will bring state-of-the-art purpose-built facilities, employing novel treatments and technologies, expertise, and research together in an environment that supports improved patient and staff experience for our radiotherapy, oncology, and hematology departments.”
The hospital hasn't revealed what has happened to the data center equipment, or how and where it be relocated.
In 2022, the hospital received a containerized data center - the Mavin Powercube. Due to the complex route into the hospital grounds, this modular data center had to be craned in.
According to Mavin, the solution was chosen as "part of a large redevelopment project at the hospital, as it offered the Trust great flexibility and easy relocation." It was intended to enable the trust's IT requirements to be unaffected during the redevelopment.
Despite this, the trust suffered an IT outage just earlier this year. In January 2024, the Royal Sussex County and Princess Royal Hospitals suffered a "critical incident" that brought down IT and phone systems.
The issue was caused by a power outage in the IT room at the Princess Royal site, but affected both hospital's IT systems. The issue was resolved by the following day.
In January, the NHS announced that it had decommissioned the data centers previously hosting the NHS Spine system after the health service had moved operations to the cloud. This includes the Electronic Prescription Service, the Personal Demographics Service, the Summary Care Record, and the e-Referral Service.
Individual hospitals and trusts continue to own and operate data centers.
