Roger Williams Medical Center Case Study

Discovering the Antidote to Tape Backup

Roger Williams Medical Center (RWMC) is a 220-bed community-owned and governed health care organization founded in 1878. Located in Providence, Rhode Island, the center offers medical and emergency care, specialty surgery, and diagnostic facilities. RWMC also serves as a teaching affiliate of the Boston University School of Medicine.

RWMC was experiencing a number of issues traditionally associated with using tape for backup, namely slow and often unreliable backups and restores. In search of a new backup vehicle and enhanced disaster recovery capabilities, RWMC found Data Domain, the solution that addressed all their needs. Data Domain provides RWMC with improved reliability; fast backup and restore times; near instantaneous replication requiring minimal bandwidth; high compression ratios (resulting in greater usable capacity); scalability for future growth and a reduced level of management overhead.

Customer Challenges

“We suffered from all the traditional issues associated with tape backup,” explains Andy Fuss, Lead Technical Engineer at RWMC. “Our backup processes were time consuming and problematic.” Facing difficulty completing full backups on a daily basis within their backup window, Fuss and his team began doing one full backup a week and daily incrementals, but they recognized that this could impact their timeline for addressing restore requests.

In short, using tape for was inefficient and costly, required too much time and effort in sending and retrieving tapes to and from off-site storage, and incurred slow restore times. Fuss and his team knew that they needed to find a replacement for tape, and were already considering disk alternatives.

“We were also reevaluating our DR plan,” explains Fuss. “Having established a new DR facility 100 miles away, we needed a way to get the data there immediately. The challenge was, how do we get the data to disk fast enough and then move it to another location as efficiently as possible without doing something complicated and expensive like SAN synchronization?”

Data Domain Solution

“It became very obvious very quickly that Data Domain was the solution,” Fuss recalls. “We evaluated a variety of options and did not find anything close to the Data Domain customer base of large scale implementations, which is what we wanted to see.”

“We did not end up taking the full 30 days to evaluate the product — we knew after just 10 days that we wanted to deploy Data Domain. The difference with Data Domain is that it just works; it’s simple. Other solutions that we looked at were not only costly, but complex and extremely intensive to get up and running, with longer implementation times.”

RWMC deployed two Data Domain DD565s, one appliance at the hospital and the second device at a DR site 100 miles away. The hospital has since streamlined both its backup and DR processes; “While our policy is still to perform one full weekly backup with daily incrementals, with Data Domain the difference is that with the way the incrementals work, it’s almost like you have a full backup every day,” explains Fuss.

Data is also instantly replicated to the DR site. As the new DR site becomes a fully interchangeable part of the environment, RWMC will start cross-replicating the data between the two Data Domain appliances.

RWMC hospital protects about 4 terabytes of data with Data Domain. Applications include the proprietary Meditech database that runs the entire hospital management system and is used for clinical, financial and administrative purposes, as well as Exchange, SQL servers, Oracle and PACS systems.

“During implementation, Data Domain stepped up to our challenges,” Fuss continues. “I was very impressed with Data Domain. I have never seen more resources available in such a short amount of time. The level of support was well beyond any expectation. It is the level of support I would dream about getting from a vendor.”

“I did not expect such strong support from Data Domain for the integration with the backup application either,” he adds. “Data Domain didn’t just give us the box and leave us to figure out the rest. They came onsite and made sure the software and hardware worked seamlessly together.”

Another capability that attracted RWMC to Data Domain is the flexibility to work with a variety of backup software solutions — rather than just one proprietary backup application — enabling the hospital to implement different backup strategies. In this regard, Fuss is currently looking at backing up the hospital’s VMware servers to Data Domain using Vizioncore.

Business Benefits

“Data Domain was the answer to what we were looking for,” says Fuss. “The DD565 delivers fast replication, and it doesn’t take up an inordinate amount bandwidth. We are getting instantaneous replication now, and that is a huge advantage for us.”

“With Data Domain, we have instant access to all our data,” Fuss continues. “Our restore times are amazing. We needed a file recovered for one of our vice presidents recently, and with Data Domain we had it back in less than 3 minutes from the initial request. The actual processing time for the recovery was 20 seconds. What would have been a 3 hour project to recover the file from tape was reduced to 3 minutes. The recovery speed alone saves us an untold number of hours.”

With compression rates of at least 20:1, but on some data as high as 30 or 40 to 1, Fuss reports that “Data Domain compression ratios are tremendous.”

“The great advantage of Data Domain is that it has enabled us to minimize the amount of tape we need,” Fuss says. “We are only using tape for a legal requirement of a month-end backup stored indefinitely. We do one clone job a month, and that’s it. Everything else is on the system. It changed everything when we didn’t have to backup to tape daily. Without Data Domain we were going to have to purchase a second vault. Now because of Data Domain compression and deduplication we are gaining space back from our vault. That is phenomenal.”

The organization is planning a full DR exercise in the next 24 months to test how well the new capabilities perform in an actual disaster recovery situation.“ Our expectation is that we will far exceed our previous ability to respond,” declares Fuss.

“Data Domain gives us room to grow,” he concludes. “We have a solution that is going to be in place for a number of years, and is easily scalable when we need to grow.” Looking further along, Fuss observes that “Data Domain technology has a lot of uses that we didn’t even consider initially, such as long term archiving purposes. There are enormous possibilities.”

“Our restore times are amazing. What would have been a 3 hour project to recover a file from tape has been reduced to 3 minutes. The recovery speed alone saves us an untold number of hours.”

Andy Fuss
Lead Technical Engineer
Roger Williams Medical Center