The background

South West Communications Group provides this vital, life saving organisation with a hosted website that takes advantage of virtualization technology as well as the appropriate bandwidth required to support its television advertising campaigns.

NHS Blood and Transplant was established as a special health authority in October 2005. Its remit is the provision of a reliable and efficient supply of blood, organs and associated services to the NHS. One of its responsibilities is to encourage people to donate organs, blood and tissues.

The challenge

When former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a debate on whether the UK should adopt an opt-out system for organ donation, the result was that the House of Commons felt opt-in was still the best policy but that 9,000,000 more donors were required in the short term.

As a result, NHS Blood and Transplant planned a television advertising campaign whereby anyone choosing to sign up to the register would be invited to log onto the service’s website.

South West Communications Group had hosted NHS Blood and Transplant’s donor website since May 2005 delivering a high availability and resilient solution with constant Internet connectivity. This new campaign would encourage additional web traffic as hopefully increased members of the public would log on to sign up to the donor register. As such, NHS Blood and Transplant required higher availability and also the flexibility and scalability to cope with increased levels of web contact, not only for this campaign but also for campaigns of the future.

The solution

South West Communications Group provided NHS Blood and Transplant with the solution it required to support www.organdonation.nhs.uk which included:

• Built-in resilience with server and infrastructure duplication eliminating any single point of failure
• Server virtualization to enable effective management of the website
• Flexible Internet bandwidth with bursting to up to 100Mb
• New server and firewall infrastructure
• 24/7 support

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