Royal Australasian College of Surgeons targets $2.1m in savings with HPE Private Cloud

The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) has moved its remaining on-premises workloads to HPE Private Cloud, targeting AU$2.1 million in savings over five years as part of a broader technology transformation.

The college deployed an HPE Private Cloud PC3000 environment, managed through the GreenLake cloud platform, after a proposed virtualisation licensing renewal came in at roughly 300% more than its previous cost and required a three-year upfront payment.

The move has reduced RACS' annual virtualisation licensing costs by up to 70% and halved its physical server count from eight to four, with estimated annual energy savings of up to 21,000 kWh.

The PC3000 environment combines HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 storage, HPE ProLiant Compute DL360 Gen12 servers and HPE Networking switches.

Deduplication delivered a 2:1 data reduction, bringing the storage volume down from 70 TB to approximately 35 TB. RACS also retired redundant development environments, reducing the number of systems its team must patch, maintain and secure.

For the not-for-profit, which trains and admits surgeons to fellowship across Australia and New Zealand, the savings are intended to free up technology capacity for member and trainee services rather than infrastructure upkeep.

"The new environment gives us the scalability and cost efficiency we need, with a cloud-like experience that is easier for our team to manage," said Andreas Diamanti, chief information officer at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

"By spending less time and money maintaining infrastructure, we can focus more of our resources on improving the experience for our members."

The migration was delivered by HPE Services and technology advisory firm Champions of Change without disruption to member services - a requirement given the college runs high-stakes surgical examinations monitored in real time during exam periods, as well as systems that record surgical training activity and support audit and accreditation responsibilities.

"We invested hundreds of hours researching the market, analysing the options and testing them against RACS's technology, security, compliance and commercial requirements," said Alex Danobrega, account director at Champions of Change.

"HPE emerged as the clear choice. The breadth across compute, storage and networking, together with GreenLake, provides RACS with a comprehensive platform."

Chris Weber, vice president and managing director for South Pacific at HPE, said the project turned a complex technology decision into a planned transformation delivered without disrupting member services, while retaining room to grow.

"By reducing the cost and effort of running core systems while retaining room to grow, RACS creates more capacity to invest in the digital experiences that support surgeons throughout their careers," he said.

RACS said its broader roadmap includes disaster recovery optimisation and more cost-effective cloud storage tiers. The college is also developing its approach to AI and other digital services, with GreenLake providing a locally managed infrastructure option as it evaluates where future workloads should run.