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Ulitzer's Business Wire reports:
The Spine -- a collection of national applications, services, and directories -- connects clinicians, patients and local service providers throughout England to essential national services, such as electronic prescriptions and patient health records.
Spine is used by more than 20,000 organizations that provide health care across England, including primary and secondary care sites, pharmacies, opticians and dentists. Riak, the open source distributed database, is key to providing the reliability and scalability for the platform to drive efficiency and improve patient care.
The NHS' move to revamp the Spine, in a major project led by England's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), was driven by the need for a scalable, resilient and flexible system that would also result in cost-savings for the organization.
With these requirements in mind, the NHS selected Riak Enterprise, the commercial version of Basho's distributed open source, highly available NoSQL database, to support the transition and implementation of the new Spine. Basho and the HSCIC collaborated throughout to ensure the technical knowledge of both organizations was reflected in enhancements to Riak and the wider project itself.
El Reg's coverage notes that the old system used a (closed-source, proprietary) Oracle product and the new software is NoSQL running on an open-source stack. It also notes the decision was made in October 2013.
Robert Pogson's commentary is also interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11 2014, @07:52PM
I'm so shocked. NOT.
Robert Pogson doesn't fall to his knees and sing Redmond's praises?
That's because he saw that junk fail repeatedly. Up close.
When it was replaced with Linux/FOSS, things got better immediately.
He was happy. (Less busy-work decrapping systems; no having to deal with EULAs and their restrictions).
His users were happy. (More uptime; fewer headaches.)
The folks passing out the (already scarce) money were happy that he was spending it on HARDWARE and not blowing it on (completely unnecessary) EULAs.
Hairyfeet constantly says that FOSS isn't up to the task (-whatever- the task is).
He **should** be embracing this opportunity to watch FOSS fall on its face so he can point and laugh when his usual predictions come true.
I will note, however, so far, Munich's 94 percent plus migration to FOSS and the more than €10M in savings there hasn't provided him with that chance to say "I told you so".
...nor has the Brazilian public school system (100 percent Linux; 500,000 seats; world's largest Linux deployment).
The same goes for the impoverished region of Extremadura, which converted 80,000 Windoze boxes to Linux over 1 weekend in 2005 and has more recently been in the process of converting the remaining 40,000.
The failure events that I remember happened at the London Stock Exchange where their all-M$ stack fell on its face repeatedly for hours and hours.
LSE has since switched to a Linux/FOSS stack.
Downtime hasn't been an issue and they love their new faster system (running on the same hardware).
-- gewg_