Press release

Red Hat Helps Public Health England Use Open Source to Pursue Hybrid Cloud Operations

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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced that Public Health England (PHE), an
executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care in the
United Kingdom, is using Red Hat’s open
hybrid cloud technologies to support modern digital public health
services in the UK. To better support its scientific community, PHE
sought to pursue an information and communication technology strategy
that embraced modern computing architectures and solutions, including
high-performance computing (HPC) and multicloud
operations, and one built from an open, automation-centric ecosystem
that could integrate a fragmented, proprietary set of existing systems.

PHE’s mission is to protect and improve the nation’s health and
wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities. It has a national leadership
role in developing new models of public health together with national
and local government, the National Health Service (NHS), the voluntary
and community sector, industry, the scientific and academic community
and global public health partners, and presenting these directly to the
public. PHE was established in 2013 to bring together specialists from
more than 100 organisations into a single public health service,
presenting a major challenge of structuring its central ICT department
to merge the numerous disparate IT systems.

In consolidating, modernizing and preparing its IT environment for
future needs, PHE had several technology requirements that it wanted to
address:

  • An open, scalable, enterprise-grade Linux platform to serve as
    the foundation for its computing footprint today and into the future.
  • A scalable private cloud infrastructure to power its
    high-performance computing (HPC) clusters used to analyze the ever
    growing amount of data required to deliver modern public health
    services.
  • A virtualization platform that could host the existing
    applications without relying on expensive proprietary technologies.
  • Hybrid and multicloud management and automation capabilities to
    host cloud-native work loads and applications that could span its
    deployments both on-premise and across multiple public cloud
    environments.

To help meet these challenges and deliver computing needs that impact
the overall welfare of the general public, PHE looked at technology
partners with a track record in delivering enterprise-grade open source
solutions for mission-critical operations. Ultimately, PHE chose Red Hat
Enterprise Linux to underpin its growing set of critical systems, as it
could help provide the necessary flexibility and capacity for hybrid
cloud innovation without sacrificing the agency’s need for
production stability and support.

PHE’s strategy initially focused on its HPC clusters, running complex
analyses of public health issues like emergency response and vaccination
policy modelling, which were costly to maintain and update individually.
PHE wanted to extend its use of open source in a reliable and secure way
to provide end-users with full self-service capabilities whilst
improving cross platform orchestration, better manage its growing
ecosystem of virtualized, private and public cloud resources, and
support its existing business-as-usual applications.

  • PHE built out a shared infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenStack
    Platform, a massively scalable and agile cloud
    Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) solution, and chose Red Hat Ceph
    Storage for its high scalability, tight integration, and comprehensive
    support for OpenStack services. PHE can now perform “bursting” of
    additional compute capacity when needed, which helps to increase the
    scalability and efficiency of HPC workloads.
  • To improve lifecycle management of legacy systems and reduce
    proprietary vendor lock-in around virtualization infrastructure, PHE
    selected Red Hat Virtualization, extending its use of open source
    technology with enterprise-grade support to back its production
    systems.
  • PHE selected Red Hat CloudForms, a highly-scalable infrastructure
    management tool, and Red Hat Ansible Tower, an enterprise framework
    for automating across IT operations including infrastructure,
    networks, cloud and security operations, as commercially-supported
    technologies to enable centralised governance and management of hybrid
    and multiclouds.

Today, PHE’s innovation program is focused on standardising
applications, simplifying systems provisioning and configuration
management, and delivering Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities.
The agency has selected Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the
industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, alongside
tightly-integrated Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, to improve data
and code portability and reusability, data sharing and team
collaboration in a hybrid cloud environment. Following a successful
pilot, PHE now plans to develop and deploy new web apps on Red Hat
OpenShift and migrate existing legacy applications onto a cloud-native
Red Hat OpenShift platform. The use of OpenShift is enabling PHE to more
easily deliver workload scalability, improve lifecycle management, and
facilitate compliance with security policies.

With its open source cloud infrastructure platform, Public Health
England is helping to accelerate service delivery, reduce operational
costs and offer IT infrastructure resources as a service and manage
hybrid and multicloud environments in a distributed cloud
infrastructure. From supporting the NHS on reducing antibiotic
prescribing and informing the public about sugar in food and drink, to
using whole genome sequencing for rapid identification of potentially
aggressive pathogens, PHE can provide a more consistent DevOps
experience and functionality across underpinning platforms, facilitating
the development and maintenance of innovative public health services.

Supporting Quotes

Francesco Giannoccaro, head of HPC and Infrastructure, Public Health
England
“The challenge for Public Health England is to keep
abreast of the opportunities created by open source cloud technologies
in order to help drive the public health principles of equity, openness
and accessibility. PHE’s ability to take better advantage of the
opportunities created by open source technology is vital in its work in
keeping the nation safe and healthy and ensuring that public health
principles are maintained and developed. PHE’s success in implementing
multi- and hybrid cloud is based on the success of the open source
community and the open source model.”

Martin Lentle, managing director, United Kingdom and Ireland, Red Hat
“Open
source technology provides a clear path for public sector organizations
seeking to align with the UK government’s cloud first and digital by
default strategies. Public Health England’s broad remit means that
interoperability, data sharing and collaboration are vital to its
success, and the enterprise-grade open source solutions provided by Red
Hat are an excellent fit for the agency, where the rapid increase in the
types and complexity of population health information requires a modern,
flexible, and open infrastructure that can support the next-generation
of applications and cloud services. Red Hat is pleased to be able to
support PHE as it advances its organisational mission into the cloud and
beyond.”

Additional Resources

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red
Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source
software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver
reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and
Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and
existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize
on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and
manage complex environments. Award-winning
support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted
adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud
providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open
source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the
digital future.

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