Hackensack University Medical Center Virtualizes Data Protection Processes

What does a hospital do when its weekly back-ups are finishing just in time to repeat the process?

That’s the dilemma that New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center (HUMC) faced. One of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, HUMC places a premium on protecting critical data, from its patient information system to its many financial applications. The 781-bed teaching and research hospital maintains more than 400 servers in its two data centers, most of which are incrementally backed up every night and completely backed up every weekend.

To ensure data integrity in the event of disaster, the medical center’s IT group had been backing data to a tape library with 12 LTO1 drives and then transporting the tapes to be stored offsite. But with growing volumes of data, the time required to copy data to tape was becoming unacceptable.“We were at the point where we almost couldn’t finish a backup before it was time to start the next one,” says systems administrator Prisco Lamdagan.

Meeting disaster recovery commitments

“Backing up data was so timeconsuming because we would have to queue all 400 servers to sequentially write data to tape,” says HUMC’s Chief Technology Officer Benjamin Bordonaro.

“Network latency, along with the technical limitations of the tape drives’ speed, hampered our ability to reduce backup times—we couldn’t push the data transfer any faster, continues Bordonaro. It would not have been
cost effective to add more tape drives to gain only a minimal reduction in backup time.”

The long backup times meant that the hospital’s IT department couldn’t meet its disaster recovery service level agreements; if a disaster occurred on a Sunday or Monday before the full weekly backup was finished, it would take far longer than the allotted 36 hours to restore lost data.

To address this issue, HUMC turned to Radiant Resources to help deploy a virtual tape library (VTL) solution. After reviewing the IT group’s performance requirements, Radiant Resources proposed several options to the hospital, which ultimately chose a Falconstor Virtual Tape Library, ADIC Scalar i2000 tape backup system
and a Hitachi Data Systems AMS 500 disk array. “Radiant didn’t try to push us into one solution—they presented us with a number of options,” says Bordonaro. “They helped us evaluate the pros and cons of each solution and involved the vendors in our presales discussions. It was clear they were committed to a successful solution and implementation.”

Accelerating backups with a virtual tape library

Each component of the Radiant VTL solution was carefully chosen to integrate seamlessly with HUMC's existing Legato backup software. Selected for their performance, scalability and rock-solid reliability, the HDS 500 AMS Array and the ADIC Scalar 1200 Tape Library rounded out the Falconstor VTL software.

The integrated VTL approach dramatically accelerates backup to physical tape with no impact on HUMC's production servers. The VTL retains backups for a predetermined period of time, allowing an enterprise to quickly restore data from a point before it was damaged or modified. “The disk array enables us to provide lightening-fast restores, since we no longer need to retrieve a tape from offsite if someone accidentally deletes a file,” says Lamdagan. “This was one of the major reasons we wanted a VTL.”

The medical center’s VTL copies data to virtual tape drives, each able to read and write data four times as fast as a physical tape drive. It then stages the disks in the Hitachi AMS 500 and quickly dumps the data to the ADIC tape library without the system latency delays and backlogs common to most tape backup systems.

With the VTL, the hospital has eliminated the cloning process with the existing backup software, significantly reducing the time to create the tapes that go off-site. “Full backups have been cut from 75 to just 29 hours, and daily incremental backups are down from 20 hours to 7 hours,” says Lamdagan. “Plus, the VTL gives us more reliable backups. Before, if a tape drive or cartridge failed, we’d have to manually restart the job, or even worse, the entire job would fail. But now we’re writing to a virtual tape that is configured to disks in a RAID set, so even if a single drive failed, another drive would automatically take over. We always have a close to perfect backup.”

Because backups affect the performance of the servers needed to run the medical center, reducing backup times means more responsive systems for end users. “The VTL has freed up servers, enabling us to provide doctors and other staff members with better IT service,” says Lamdagan.

Optimization in a complex environment

The medical center realized from the start that implementing a complete virtual tape library solution that met all of the technical and business requirements would be a complex process. “We wanted a proven solution from a leading vendor that could integrate with our systems and deliver good performance,” says Bordonaro. “Radiant’s solution met our needs and they consistently worked with us to optimize its performance. This is ultimately a custom solution and involves some fine-tuning to really work right.”

Radiant’s technical team, working closely with their vendors/partners, determined that HUMC could improve the performance of its VTL by a full 15 percent by configuring its disk controllers, which act as a gateway for storing data, in an active-active mode that enables them to route data most efficiently. “Thanks to Radiant, we’ve been able to meet our SLA windows to move tapes offsite and still be able to execute our DR plan,” says Bordonaro. “Due to the up-front effort put into the configuration, the performance of the VTL surpassed our expectations.”

With the VTL solution in place, the medical center’s IT staff is well-positioned to meet the demands of future growth.“We know that data volumes will continue to expand, but feel we now have a very scalable backup system,” says Lamdagan. “If the amount of data we have to backup doubled, we could still meet our commitments just by adding some virtual tape drives on the fly.”

Get a VTL solution you can count on. Contact a Radiant Resources data protection expert or call us at 1-800-500-7675.

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