BroMenn Healthcare

BroMenn Healthcare Eliminates Backup Pain with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

BroMenn Medical Center is a 221-bed hospital located in Bloomington-Normal, IL, and has been serving and caring for the people of central Illinois for nearly 120 years. BroMenn Medical Center was acquired by Carle Health.

Key Benefits:

System easily scales when more capacity is needed
Data deduplication maximizes disk space
Seamless recovery process
Top-notch customer support

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Unacceptable RTO with a Tape-based Solution Drove the Need for a Disk-based Backup Appliance

The Carle BroMenn Healthcare System serves an eight-county area in central Illinois. The company backs up typical hospital-related data files including SQL databases, patient records, MS Office documents, and PDFs, on several physical servers and many virtual servers. For several years they were staging their backups daily to their SAN, then offloading to tape.

According to Information Technology Manager Scott Hargus, his team spent hours every week troubleshooting and managing the company’s tape libraries. When tickets came in from their end-users needing to recover data it was a long drawn out process. It could take days because tapes would have to first be retrieved from offsite storage. So Carle BroMenn Healthcare had a very difficult time meeting the end user requirements with the previous system that was only staging to disk, then ultimately copying to tape for longer term retention. The final straw was an incident where Finance needed some data to complete a critical month-end process and they needed it fast. IT struggled to recover the data quickly enough due to the limitations of recovering data from a tape-based solution.

“We needed to solve this problem. We wanted to eliminate tape costs and administration hassles and streamline our data recovery process. Disk backup with deduplicaton was on our strategic plan, but the time was now to move on it,” said Hargus. After some extensive research into different solutions that used either post-process or inline deduplication methods, BroMenn Healthcare decided to implement ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage. The ExaGrid solution works along with the company’s existing backup application, CommVault. For Disaster Recovery, the company implemented a second ExaGrid system to replicate backups automatically at their secondary data center located 35 miles away. “Key factors in selecting ExaGrid were the speed of the post-process deduplication method and scalability. We wanted a system that was cost effective but also gave us the backup and restore performance and retention we required not just for today, but for tomorrow as our data inevitably grows. ExaGrid does all that and more,” said Hargus.

"For us, the seamless recovery process is priceless. It’s great to implement better technology to save IT time and headaches, but when the value is seen by our end-users, the payback is ten-fold. Our users are amazed at how quickly and smoothly we can service their needs for data. "

Scott Hargus, IT Manager

Seamless Point-and-click Data Recovery and Many Saved Man-hours

According to Hargus, ExaGrid’s unique data deduplication technology and architecture are important for his requirements.

ExaGrid’s turnkey disk-based backup system combines enterprise drives with zone-level data deduplication, delivering a disk-based solution that is far more cost effective than simply backing up to disk with deduplication or using backup software deduplication to disk. ExaGrid’s patented zone-level deduplication reduces the disk space needed by a range of 10:1 to 50:1, depending on the data types and retention periods, by storing only the unique objects across backups instead of redundant data. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups. As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it is also replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

“For us, the seamless recovery process is priceless. It’s great to implement better technology to save IT time and headaches, but when the value is seen by our end-users, the payback is ten-fold. Our users are amazed at how quickly and smoothly we can service their needs for data,” said Hargus. “With the ExaGrid in place, data recovery is no longer a big issue for IT or our users. Also, we have done an analysis and are very pleased that we will be saving several hundred man-hours in reduced tape administration and troubleshooting duties. Add that to our reduced expenses on tape media and we are certainly seeing a nice ROI on the product,” said Hargus.

Speed, Scalability to Grow as Company Data Grows and Top-Notch Customer Support

A testament to how fast the post-process approach to deduplication is would be the fact that after installing the ExaGrid system, their backup times were just as fast, if not faster than when they were staging to disk directly. That’s because the full backup is landed on the disk, at the speed of disk. There is no faster way.

“The final selling point for us was not just the price,” said Hargus. “But the fact that the most recent backup is kept in it’s full, non-deduplicated form. This means that we don’t have to re-hydrate the backup in order to make a tape copy. When we first implemented the system we needed to continue to make weekly tape copies. It just didn’t make sense to deduplicate it, then turn around and re-hydrate it to make a tape copy. It’s much faster and made more sense to us.”

ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customer’s never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly. “ExaGrid’s support has been exemplary,” said Hargus. “Their knowledge of the system and our environment has really been helpful and they go the extra mile to optimize the backup process even if it’s something that doesn’t involve ExaGrid directly. My customer support engineer in particular, has been phenomenal.”

ExaGrid and CommVault

The Commvault backup application has a level of data deduplication. ExaGrid can ingest Commvault deduplicated data and increase the level of data deduplication by 3X providing a combined deduplication ratio of 15;1, significantly reducing the amount and cost of storage up front and over time. Instead of performing data at rest encryption in Commvault ExaGrid, performs this function in the disk drives in nanoseconds. This approach provides an increase of 20% to 30% for Commvault environments while greatly reducing storage costs.

Intelligent Data Protection

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story