NHS Tears Out Its Oracle Spine In Favour Of Open Source

Health authority parachutes in Riak, Redis to save on dosh & screwups

The UK government's quest to get public services to use more open source technologies seems to be taking hold, judging by the revamp of the NHS's very large Spine service.

The upgrade from Spine to Spine2 will see the NHS shift the core of its main secure patient database and messaging platform from Oracle onto a bevy of open source technologies including the Riak datastore, Redis, Nginx, Tornado, and RabbitMQ, along with some proprietary technologies like Splunk. Riak developer Basho announced the plans on Wednesday. This also sees it enlist a Brit IT contractor named BJSS to help with the rollout, as opposed to a much larger mega-consultancy.

"While this [use of open source] is now fairly common practice at the application tier, the ability to have a resilient, distributed data storage tier on the same commodity hardware makes a significant contribution to the cost efficiency of this solution," Mark Pullen, chief software engineer for BJSS, told El Reg via email.