Baystate Health Turns to SEPATON for Critical Backup of Patient Records

Baystate Health is a health services and delivery network comprising three hospitals, numerous physicians’ offices, and five clinical centers as well as home-based and ambulatory services providers. Based in Springfield, MA, the network has more than 9,000 employees.

When disk-to-disk backup systems could no longer provide the high level of protection and performance they needed to protect patient record data, Baystate Health installed a SEPATON® S2100®-ES2 virtual tape library system and achieved dramatically improved data protection. Study

Baystate Health Overview
Health services delivery network with more than 9,000 employees.

Backup Application
IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager

Key Benefits
Reduced backup window
Reduced restore times
Nearly eliminated tape media management

The Environment
All of Baystate Health’s patient records are stored in a centralized Oracle® database system. Downtime for this system is not only costly (estimated at $50,000 to $100,000 per hour) but it could even be life threatening. If this system goes
down, medical staff cannot access critical information such as allergy alerts, medicine plans, test results, and patient history

Baystate Health’s critical Oracle database runs on an IBM AIX server with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (ITSM) for backup and restore. They were sending backup data to disk using Oracle® RMAN. After trying all options for tuning this system, their backup window was still closing fast. Performance was suffering and recovery time objectives (RTO) were unacceptable.

The Challenge
“The critical nature of our data requires that we perform full back ups on a nightly basis,” explained John Stabilo, Assistant Director, Technology Management for Baystate Health. “With our backup times exceeding nine hours and growing at a rate of 10 percent per month, we knew we needed a better solution.”

The Evaluation
Dave Miller, Database Architect for Baystate Health, recommended that they explore virtual tape library (VTL) technology as a possible solution. “Lighthouse Computer Services, our IBM partner, suggested that we consider the SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL appliance,” said Miller. “While we looked at competing solutions, we chose SEPATON because the S2100 was easy to configure, it enabled us to continue to use RMAN backup soft ware, and it could handle our data volume both now and as we grow.”

SEPATON staff provided a demonstration of the product for John Stabilo. “I visited SEPATON’s office and had it configured in five minutes,” said Stabilo. “After that five-minute test drive, I was sold.”

The Solution
Baystate Health installed a SEPATON S2100-ES2 and continued to use their ITSM backup soft ware without changing their policies or procedures.
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Customer Case Study
Although Baystate Health initially planned to use the S2100 as the backup solution for just their Oracle system, the VTL quickly became the obvious choice for their Microsoft Exchange e-mail system as well. “We needed a faster way to backup more than 3.5 TB of data on our e-mail server. It runs in an Intel environment with EMC Legato NetWorker soft ware. Because SEPATON’s VTL works in so many environments, it was the perfect solution for backing up our administrative data as well,” explained Miller.

The Results
Using the SEPATON S2100 has meant that Baystate Health now performs full backups every night in just two hours. This performance has made the S2100 the near-line backup system and restore option of choice. “The S2100 has saved us a lot of heartache,” said Stabilo. “Our RTO has improved significantly. In the event of an outage, we can find and restore whatever data we need in minutes, versus the hours required by our previous system. Our goal is to move all critical systems to the SEPATON VTL.”

Moving forward, Baystate Health intends to take advantage of other SEPATON products. “While SEPATON has the best VTL in the industry for price, performance and scalability, it is also delivering soft ware applications that add even more value. As our budget and priorities dictate, we look forward to adding other capabilities that leverage its ContentAware™ architecture and soft ware applications,” concluded Stabilo.