Canberra systems integrator Qirx has migrated the critical systems of the National Blood Authority (NBA) to a virtual desktop infrastructure platform.
NBA is a federal government agency that coordinates the supply of blood and related products in Australia. It supplies four million units of blood a year, valued at $1.2 billion.
Prior to the migration, NBA’s staff had no mobile access to the agency’s critical blood management and patient registry systems.
Qirx designed and rolled out the new platform using hyperconverged technology from Nutanix as the underlying infrastructure for the VDI environment.
This gives NBA’s approximately 100 staff the ability to access the agency’s systems remotely, including the award-winning BloodNet management system.
NBA chief information officer Peter O’Halloran – who won this year's coveted iTnews CIO of the year crown for BloodNet – worked with Qirx to implement the new cloud environment.
“We needed a way to give staff the most up-to-date information at all times, whether they’re accessing our main blood management system named BloodNet, the Australian Bleeding Disorders Registry, or any other application,” O’Halloran said.
“Nutanix provided a reliable means to make this possible; if we didn’t have the technology, there would be an increase in cost of about $10 million per annum to cover blood wastage – that means at least 20,000 extra blood donors would need to be called in every year.”
Qirx general manager Nick Winch praised NBA’s cooperation and willingness to adopt the new technology. “They had a vision and we had the ability to bring it to fruition and work together to resolve any issues.
“Clients that are partners throughout the process makes life much easier. We’re always looking for the win-win, but we’d prefer if we break even or lose rather than our customer lose.”
Based in Canberra, Qirx provides virtualisation, storage, servers and networking solutions to a range of customers from small businesses to federal government.
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