Meeting Healthcare’s Requirements for Effective Data Protection

Featured article by Florin Dejeu, Director of Product Management, Sepaton, Inc.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) hold the key to higher quality and more accurate patient care. But they also cause healthcare providers, pharmaceutical firms and insurance payers to generate massive volumes of data. Imaging, diagnostics, prescriptions, patient records, claims and other protected health information — all must be safely backed up and kept quickly restorable to assure that they are protected, available and securely accessible as needed by providers and as required by law.

The stakes are high. Delayed access to EHR can mean costly retesting, time-consuming appointment delay or lower quality patient care. Failure to comply with data backup, retention, restore, and erasure requirements could be subject to regulatory fines. Yet as the volume of data increases and backup windows grow smaller, it becomes more challenging to complete a safe and reliable backup within the competing constraints of time, capacity and cost.

The University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) is a leading health care system affiliated with the University of Utah, comprising four hospitals and 10 neighborhood health centers. The healthcare system and the University rely on mission-critical IT systems to manage hospital operations, patient records, financial records, student records, and a variety of other key functions. As a healthcare organization, they are required to securely retain patient data for seven years to stay in compliance with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). They also need to protect the data of thousands of staff and students who rely on these systems.

With data volumes growing at more than 20 percent annually, their physical tape systems could not provide the capacity, performance or reliability they needed to back up massive data volumes within short backup windows or to copy these large data volumes to tape archives quickly and efficiently.

The UUHC had introduced a non-scalable disk-based backup system to deduplicate their data and improve their backup performance and disaster recovery. They also had a smaller disk-based deduplication system in their disaster recovery site with Network File System (NFS) mounted backups.

UUHC decided to conduct a thorough evaluation of leading disk-based data protection systems from Exagrid, Falconstor, Symantec, HP, EMC, and Sepaton. In the end, HP and Sepaton were the chosen candidates who qualified for a rigorous proof-of-concept with the following requirements:

– Performance that could backup tens of terabytes per day within backup windows

– Flexibility and capacity to allow them to stage data for efficient copy to tape

– Deduplication that would reduce capacity requirements of large databases without slowing backup performance

– Scalability to grow as their data volumes increased over time

– Support for NetBackup OST backup

UUHC conducted the most difficult proof-of-concept (POC) possible. They not only treated the systems like they were in full production, they pushed them hard to find their limits. The Sepaton S2100-ES3 gateway met their POC challenges with ease.

The Sepaton system was installed and running quickly and seamlessly, using NetBackup OST over Fibre Channel. Sepaton provided excellent support services and highly knowledgeable staff.  The backup performance has exceeded their expectations. Before Sepaton, they fought to meet backup windows. With Sepaton, they meet their backup windows and everything is clean. Restore times are also fast.

The Sepaton system also enables UUHC Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) database administrators to conduct their Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) restores to NetApp file shares as they need them, allowing them to conduct faster and more efficient development work.  Before Sepaton, they could only use four streams to backup 13-15TB of data for one of their key Oracle databases. With Sepaton, they can use 10 streams, cutting backup times for it by nearly fifty percent.

The Sepaton S2100 made the UUHC tape staging process significantly less time consuming and more efficient. Because the Sepaton system knows the data backup and data type, it is much more efficient at reclaiming scratch tapes and unused capacity. As a result, the system runs seamlessly.

Sepaton S2100 also provided significantly better deduplication ratios than their legacy system. They are getting improved capacity reclamation on their largest Oracle database and excellent deduplication ratios overall.

UUHC plans to add Sepaton systems in its remote replication sites for disaster protection.

Florin Dejeu, director of product management, Sepaton, Inc. has more than 20 years of product management experience, overseeing the development of products that address the information management needs of large enterprises with emphasis on storage, archiving, classification, HSM and data protection solutions.