NSW Health CIO commends data centre flood recovery

eHealth NSW boss Michael Walsh has publicly commended the efforts of Hunter Valley-based IT support staff who worked to turn around a power outage threatening one of the health system’s core data centres during last week’s storms.

The region bore the worst of a dramatic storm cell that hit NSW earlylast week, and wreaked havoc on the electricity supply at Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital.

John Hunter currently houses one of three major data centre facilities used by NSW Health to runs its statewide IT core.

A spokeswoman for the department told iTnews the John Hunter back-up power systems kicked in as planned, but ICT services struggled under “frequent fluctuations in the main power supply”.

She confirmed several systems failed as a result at 5:40 am.

“This caused disruption to some ICT services hosted in the data centre,” she said.

“Upon confirmation of the loss of power, service restoration work started immediately, involving ICT staff, hospital engineering staff and external service contractors.”

She said services were fully restored by midday the same day.

Walsh acclaimed the efforts of local support staff, specifically highlighting the John Hunter IT team who worked solidly to get the John Hunter data centre back up and running”.

“Information Services staff worked tirelessly amid treacherous conditions to recover the Newcastle data centre operations and support recovery of affected IT systems in the data centre,” he said.

“Cumberland eHealth staff continued to provide service desk services without air-conditioning.”

eHealth NSW is in the process of migrating the services currently run out of John Hunter into the central tier three GovDC facilities in Silverwater and Unanderra.