Client: Children’s Hospital Boston
Industry: Healthcare
Solution: Four DD460 Restorers
Company
Children’s Hospital Boston is the nation’s premier pediatric
medical center. As one of the largest and top-ranked pediatric medical centers
in the United States, Children’s offers a complete range of health care
services for children from birth through 21 years of age.
Founded in 1869 as a 20-bed hospital for children, today Children’s
Hospital is a 347-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health
care. Each year, Children’s manages approximately 18,000 inpatient
admissions and more than 300,000 outpatient admissions. Children’s also
helps shape the future and quality of children’s health care as the
primary pediatric teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, home to the
world’s leading pediatric research enterprise.
Customer Challenges
A major pediatric medical center and research institution, Children’s
Hospital Boston has significant backup requirements: approximately 60
terabytes of continuously growing data, from business systems and research to
patient records and radiology imaging files. Reliable backups, as well as the
ability to restore files quickly whenever needed, are essential.
As the medical center’s backup needs grew, its tape drives seemed
unable to keep up with the demand. Drives malfunctioned frequently and
administrators often had to rerun backups.
“With new systems coming on board, our backup window was getting
tight and things were running much longer than we could stand. A lot of people
were losing sleep over our backup environment,” said Paul Scheib,
Director of Operations and Chief Information Security Officer at
Children’s.
Scheib saw disk as the likely answer to the hospital’s backup,
restore and replication objectives. The hospital attempted to improve
performance by simplifying its setup, reducing the number of media servers and
bringing in virtual tape library (VTL) technology. It turned out to have two
problems:
- Instead of simplifying the institution’s backup environment,
VTL seemed to add to administrators’ headaches. SAN configuration
issues, software configuration issues and administrative complexity all got
worse instead of better. Scheib didn’t want to add yet another piece of
equipment for administrators to wrestle with.
- In addition, Children’s failed to see the performance gains it
anticipated with VTL and could not pinpoint the source of the problem.
Beyond performance and reliability requirements, the hospital planned to
implement a new disaster recovery strategy. Ideally, it hoped to replicate
data at a secondary site that would enable quick access for rapid
restores.
Data Domain Solution
On a contact’s recommendation, Children’s Hospital pilot tested
the Data Domain DD460 Restorer, reliable backup and recovery appliance for
data protection. Because of their experience with VTL claims that did not
deliver, Children’s did not initially believe Data Domain’s claims
about capacity optimization. The possibilities of increased ease of use with a
reliable disk system were enough to get started.
Data Domain offered a number of key advantages where VTL fell short. With
VTL, Children’s Hospital would have needed just as much tape
infrastructure. The VTL storage would just have been a short-term cache, and
most recoveries would still have been from tape. With Data Domain’s
capacity optimization, the hospital could reduce its need for tape, and could
consider gradually phasing it out altogether.
With Data Domain, the hospital could also preserve its investment in its
existing VERITAS backup software. No additional software was required on their
network of servers.
Whereas other solutions could not accommodate replication, Data Domain
could facilitate replication by reducing the amount of data on the WAN, and
its related bandwidth costs, through exceptional capacity optimization.
Business Benefits
Soon after starting the Data Domain pilot program, Children’s
Hospital began seeing faster, more reliable backups, as well as the 20:1
compression effects promised by Data Domain — a pleasant surprise
considering other solutions had promised improved backup and restore times,
but never delivered.
“We had heard about improved backup and restore times on VTL, but
never saw a significant improvement in our testing. With Data Domain, we
started seeing the 20:1 compression we had heard about, as well as the backup
and restore speeds that we hoped for in disk-to-disk operations.”
Data Domain systems significantly reduced the hospital’s tape
requirements, allowing them to decommission one tape library immediately. The
new technology also extended the life of their remaining tape library by
relegating it only to off-site archival storage. With VTL, the hospital would
have needed to upgrade its tape library more quickly to keep pace with growth
and shorter backup windows.
The new systems also demonstrated performance improvements, with both
backups and restores moving more quickly. The hospital runs multiple streams
to the same device, a performance-boosting step it could not achieve with tape
without severe impact to recovery time due to multiplexing.
From past experience, Children’s had come to expect a constant
struggle when it came to managing backup solutions. But in fact, Data Domain
defied the hospital’s expectations. “We just plugged in Data
Domain and it worked,” Scheib said.
Data Domain additionally brings Children’s closer to its disaster
recovery objectives. With the Data Domain Replicator, the DD460’s can
replicate data from one location to another. The ability to conserve bandwidth
with Data Domain compression will also prove valuable.
Moving forward, Children’s plans to significantly reduce their use of
tape. In doing so, Scheib anticipates significant additional space, labor and
cost savings.
“With Data Domain, we started seeing the 20:1 compression we had
heard about. We could get a lot of disk in a small footprint. If we had bought
a comparable amount of disk from another provider, it would require more
chassis and more cost.”
Paul Scheib
Director of Operations & Chief Information Security Officer
Children’s Hospital Boston
