Case Studies
Case Studies

ST. VINCENT HOSPITAL

In many ways, St. Vincent Hospital & Health Services in Indianapolis is a typical big-city hospital. However, big-city IT infrastructure was causing its backups to have big-city problems.

The medical center operates a heterogeneous server farm, running primarily Windows NT and NetWare along with Macintosh and UNIX devices. Large, data-intensive applications used for diagnostic imaging included McKesson DICOM and ALI UltraPACS digital imaging systems were being backed up.

Conducting full backups of the 6TB of data to tape took from 36-48 hours, which eliminated any hope of conducting nightly backups. One full backup ate up 90 tapes and cost about $7,500. With costs spiraling out of control and a complex environment only getting more complex by the day, IT management knew traditional backup had outlived its usefulness.

After considerable research, senior engineers Andy Porter and Rich Banta decided that utilizing ATA disk arrays for disk-to-disk backup facilitated by EVault InfoStage software would help solve the headaches and result in significant cost savings. At less than one cent/MB, ATA drives are considerably cheaper than SCSI drives, which average around 3 to 5 cents/MB. With thousands of drives under management at St.Vincent, the choice translated into significant cost savings.

Porter and Banta's group deployed an ATA-based, StorageTek BladeStore disk subsystem with EVault InfoStage software. InfoStage agents were installed on the servers, which performed incremental backups of the host computers and then compressed, encrypted and transported the reduced amount of data to the BladeStore.

By only taking changes or new files since the last backup, the reduction of downtime and cost-effectiveness was dramatic. Backups were shortened from more than 36-48 hours to less than five hours. Implementing disk-based backup saved the hospital more than $1.1 million in costs including hardware and media costs and manpower time to manage the process.

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