Speed and stability have since become the norm. A demonstration of its backup procedure took just five minutes from start to finish systems from other vendors under consideration took as long as three days to complete the same task. The Unitrends solution was faster and more efficient from the start. “Our staff was able to pick up on it very quickly.” “I like to say the interface is so slick it’s greasy,” Jones says with a laugh. The difference in ease of use is dramatic. “We couldn’t see into the data to know if our servers had been successfully backed up or not, and occasionally the backups would be corrupted.”Īfter evaluating a handful of backup alternatives, Floyd chose a Unitrends Recovery 946S appliance in its primary data center and a Recovery 944S in its DR location. “ It was a miserable experience,” says Jones. “Dedicated healthcare solutions, like those offered by Commvault, Veeam and other vendors, offer healthcare organizations the performance qualities they require and are designed to support critical document security and compliance functions,” he says.įloyd Medical Center, a not-for-profit system of three hospitals and multiple primary care clinics in Georgia and Alabama, had been taking hourly snapshots of all the system’s virtual machines to back up its 750TB of live data, says IT director Lee Jones.īut the solution was far from ideal. These days, tape systems are largely relegated to long-term archiving, says Charles King, president and principal analyst for Pund-IT. “If you can’t trust that it can bring your systems back from a disaster, then it serves you no good purpose.” Ease of Use Provides Speed and Efficiency “In a health information system, having reliable backup and disaster recovery is the most important thing you can have,” Koppa says. The Commvault solution is also significantly less expensive than MCMH’s previous system and provides efficiencies that free up a full-time employee to focus on other tasks. ![]() (Previously, the CIO had to pack up the tapes and take them home each night, Koppa notes.) The move allowed the hospital to establish a disaster recovery site 40 miles away, where it does live replication throughout the day. ![]() Backup and Disaster Recovery Systems Save Time and Money MORE FROM HEALTHTECH: Learn why backup services should be a key part of disaster planning efforts. “Now, it takes me about five minutes to check the backup report each day to make sure everything is working.” ![]() “With our old system, I had no confidence I was getting good backups, and restoring was always really painful,” Eubank says. And the new system automatically picks up any new VMs when they’re created. The Commvault platform needs to be installed only once on the host, and it manages all guest virtual machines beneath it, says Reagan Eubank, a network technician for the hospital. At the time, Commvault was the only solution that supported both the VMware and Hyper-V environments in use at the hospital, as well as the IBM AIX systems that host the hospital’s electronic health record data, Koppa notes. In early 2017, MCMH migrated to the Commvault Data Platform. As medical data proliferates and HIPAA regulations mandate secure duplicate record keeping, hospitals are adopting new and efficient methods of backing up their important data - a move that ultimately simplifies the restoration process while saving money. “It didn’t do what we needed it to do, and was costing us more than it was worth.” “It was a nightmare,” says Terry Koppa, network administrator for the hospital. Restoring records took days, requiring a full-time employee to manage the workflow. Tapes had to be manually checked in and checked out they’d often break or become scratched and unreadable in the process. ![]() The hassles were many: A software agent had to be installed on every virtual machine to automate the backup. Until about two years ago, however, the hospital had been relying on an ancient tape backup system that was no longer up to the task. To ensure compliance with data protection regulations, MCMH and other organizations need secure and reliable data backup systems. Besides being the only emergency care facility within 35 miles, it’s also tasked with safeguarding 70 terabytes of patient health and reimbursement records. Staffers at Montgomery County Memorial Hospital in rural Red Oak, Iowa, know this well. As the volume of health data increases exponentially, the need to protect medical records against loss or corruption becomes even more critical. Information is the lifeblood of healthcare.
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