Backup to Tape Troubles Take Daughters of Charity Health Systems down Deduplication Path
DCIG regularly talks to organizations that are confronted with continuing data growth, ongoing tape problems, saturated WAN links and overworked IT staff who recognize that changes to their existing backup environment are needed. However non-profits such as the Daughters of Charity Health Systems (DCHS) with limited funding for new technology purchases are particularly challenged as they have no margin for error.
Recently I spoke to Michael Day, the IT Director for DCHS, a regional health system of six hospitals and medical centers that spans the California coast from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles.
In talking with Day, he describes DCHS as a "wonderful organization with a challenging business model" as its charter calls for it to provide health care services to anyone regardless of their income level. This creates exceptional challenges when funding new technology purchases.
DCHS specifically needed to update its backup environment to protect its growing amount of data. In addition to backing up hundreds of physical servers across its six data centers, its data volumes were growing 15% year over year driven by new applications and servers and lengthening clinical data retention requirements.
The increasing amount of time spent managing its backup jobs was of particular concern. DCHS staff conservatively spent ten hours a week managing backup processes. Then troubleshooting failed backup jobs as a result of malfunctioning tape libraries consumed even more time. Day says, "We were constantly challenged with tape libraries as they were not de-staging data fast enough for us, particularly at our larger sites."
So DCHS began to search for a solution that would improve its:
To meet these objectives, it was evident early on that DCHS would need to expand its use of disk plus introduce deduplication. However DCHS was unclear at the start if deduplication would benefit its backup environment.
Being in close proximity to EMC's Backup & Recovery Systems division headquarters gave DCHS access to EMC's executive briefing center and deduplication lab environment. Here it could get fully educated and test EMC solutions to experience first-hand how deduplication worked and what benefits the healthcare provider could expect to see.
Deduplication plus the integration between NetWorker and Data Domain via the Data Domain Boost software gave DCHS confidence that EMC could meet its needs into the foreseeable future. This combination of features, disk-based backup performance, higher reliability and optimized replication all backed by EMC's service and support gave DCHS a high level of comfort with Data Domain and led to its decision to move forward with EMC.
In the next blog entry in this two-part series, we will take a look at how DCHS's implementation of Data Domain went or you may read the entire case study now.
Recently I spoke to Michael Day, the IT Director for DCHS, a regional health system of six hospitals and medical centers that spans the California coast from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles.
In talking with Day, he describes DCHS as a "wonderful organization with a challenging business model" as its charter calls for it to provide health care services to anyone regardless of their income level. This creates exceptional challenges when funding new technology purchases.
DCHS specifically needed to update its backup environment to protect its growing amount of data. In addition to backing up hundreds of physical servers across its six data centers, its data volumes were growing 15% year over year driven by new applications and servers and lengthening clinical data retention requirements.
The increasing amount of time spent managing its backup jobs was of particular concern. DCHS staff conservatively spent ten hours a week managing backup processes. Then troubleshooting failed backup jobs as a result of malfunctioning tape libraries consumed even more time. Day says, "We were constantly challenged with tape libraries as they were not de-staging data fast enough for us, particularly at our larger sites."
So DCHS began to search for a solution that would improve its:
- Backup efficiencies and reliability
- Consolidation of both physical and growing virtual infrastructures
- The level of service provided to its internal customers
- The quality of life for its IT associates
To meet these objectives, it was evident early on that DCHS would need to expand its use of disk plus introduce deduplication. However DCHS was unclear at the start if deduplication would benefit its backup environment.
Being in close proximity to EMC's Backup & Recovery Systems division headquarters gave DCHS access to EMC's executive briefing center and deduplication lab environment. Here it could get fully educated and test EMC solutions to experience first-hand how deduplication worked and what benefits the healthcare provider could expect to see.
Deduplication plus the integration between NetWorker and Data Domain via the Data Domain Boost software gave DCHS confidence that EMC could meet its needs into the foreseeable future. This combination of features, disk-based backup performance, higher reliability and optimized replication all backed by EMC's service and support gave DCHS a high level of comfort with Data Domain and led to its decision to move forward with EMC.
In the next blog entry in this two-part series, we will take a look at how DCHS's implementation of Data Domain went or you may read the entire case study now.
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