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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Firelands Regional Medical Center Simplifies Backups with ExaGrid

Customer Overview

Firelands Regional Medical Center is the area’s largest and most comprehensive resource for quality medical care. Resulting from the consolidation of what once were three separate hospitals serving the area, Firelands Regional Medical Center now serves as the only full-service medical center in Erie County. With more than 250 physicians and allied health practitioners on staff representing 33 specialties, Firelands Regional Medical Center provides care each year to 10,000 inpatients, 277,000 outpatients and 102,000 community program participants.

Key Benefits:

  • Significant financial savings
  • Critical DR solution
  • Seamless integration with Arcserve
  • Easy set up & proactive customer support
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Constant Mechanical Issues with Tape Library

The IT staff at Firelands backs up its electronic medical records system and other critical data in
real time to a storage-area network (SAN), but the tape library the facility used for nightly backups was often down due to mechanical issues.

“Our tape libraries were located in a closet in a remote part of our campus, and we were constantly dealing with issues caused by dust and connectivity problems,” said Mike Regan, senior network analyst for the Firelands Regional Medical Center. “We were spending a lot of unnecessary time troubleshooting and cleaning the tape libraries and our backups weren’t reliable.”

"The cost of the ExaGrid system was considerably less than purchasing new tape libraries and we no longer have to worry about the mechanical issues. It made perfect financial sense. "

Mike Regan, Senior Network Analyst

Cost-effective ExaGrid System Provides Reliable Backups

At first, the IT department tried to solve the problem by backing up to disk but found it time consuming and expensive. Then, Firelands installed an ExaGrid disk-based backup system to replace its failing tape libraries. The ExaGrid system works along with the facility’s existing backup application, Arcserve, and protects data from Firelands’ Meditech electronic medical records system along with the facility’s other patient, financial, operational and business data.

“Because our critical systems are backed up in real time, we needed a solution that would act sort of as an insurance policy in case of a disaster. The ExaGrid system fit right into our environment, and it works flawlessly,” said Regan. “The cost of the ExaGrid system was considerably less than purchasing new tape libraries and we no longer have to worry about the mechanical issues. It made perfect financial sense.”

Easy to Set up and Manage, Outstanding Customer Support

“The ExaGrid system was very easy to set up and it’s simple to manage remotely,” said Regan. “We’ve also had good experiences with ExaGrid’s customer support. Our support engineer proactively calls us to ensure that things are going smoothly and to make us aware of any new
software updates that come up.”

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.

Data Deduplication Reduces Amount of Data Stored

“The thing that attracted us to the ExaGrid solution was its built-in data deduplication technology. It works behind the scenes to significantly reduce the amount of data we keep on disk,” said Regan. “Another big plus was that we were able to keep our existing investment in Arcserve. The two products work extremely well together.”

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). When a second site is used, the cost savings are even greater because ExaGrid’s byte-level data deduplication technology moves only changes, requiring minimal WAN bandwidth.

The ExaGrid system can easily scale to accommodate data growth. ExaGrid’s software makes the system highly scalable – appliances of any size or age can be mixed and matched in a single system. A single scale-out system can take in up to a 2.7PB full backup plus retention at an ingest rate of up to 488TB per hour. ExaGrid appliances contain not just disk but also processing power, memory, and bandwidth. When the system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply added to the existing system. The system scales linearly, maintaining a fixed-length backup window as data grows so customers only pay for what they need, when they need it. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing Repository Tier with automatic load balancing and global deduplication across all repositories.

ExaGrid and Arcserve Backup

Efficient backup requires close integration between the backup software and backup storage. That is the advantage delivered by the partnership between Arcserve and ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage. Together, Arcserve and ExaGrid provide a cost-effective backup solution that scales to meet the needs of demanding enterprise environments.

Intelligent Data Protection

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).

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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