A UK hospital has put out a £1 million ($1.32m) tender for a modular data center.
Described as for the "supply and ongoing support of a data center at Bridgwater Community Hospital," the tender is seeking a modular and portable solution.
Published on September 13, the contract is set to last 36 months. The deadline for proposals is October 13.
According to a document, the Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has put out the call for a new facility to increase the capacity of its disaster recovery data center "to accommodate new server infrastructure and ensure that the Trust can continue delivering resilient services across Somerset."
The document adds: "Due to cost pressures and clinical software vendor architecture, cloud-hosted options are not commercially viable currently and changes can occur that are beyond our influence. We are unable to expand existing IT infrastructure centers without significant disruption or lengthy and costly development.
"To deliver the physical compute and storage capacity we seek a purpose-built facility that can accommodate existing IT requirements and the Trust’s project needs for the next 25 years. We require that the new data center environment is operational within four months of an agreed start date."
The data center will operate "dark" and therefore cannot require full-time staff, and should be a "secure energy efficient data center" that will be constructed off-site and assembled on-site.
The main computer area will need to accommodate 20 racks, with a fully utilized IT load of 200kW expected.
In January 2024, the NHS confirmed that it had decommissioned its data centers that were hosting the NHS Spine system, having migrated it to the cloud. Despite this, many NHS sites still have on-premise data centers for other workloads.
Last week, two hospitals in Nottingham experienced an IT failure that prevented them from being able to conduct blood tests. In May 2024, the Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust's Dewsbury and District Hospital in the UK got a new 'digital data center."
