The UK’s NHS – Leveraging Azure and ScaleArc for Easy Scale, Zero Downtime
England’s National Health Service generates some amazing stats:
- world’s largest and oldest single-payer healthcare system
- employs 1.5 million people
- helps more than 1 million patients every 36 hours
NHS Choices, the online interface to the NHS’s education and information resources, understandably has a scaling challenge – the website has to support more than 50 million visits every month. As often happens, the database proved the most challenging technology layer to scale.
NHS Choices runs on Azure, and the IT team leverages a mix of SQL Server versions. The big struggles were maintaining app performance, despite legacy architectures, maintenance windows, and unplanned failover.
Check out the full case study to read more about how NHS Choices leveraged a combination of Azure and ScaleArc to
- support zero downtime maintenance and database upgrades
- deliver automatic read/write split for faster performance
- enable app-transparent failover across Azure regions