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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Helps Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center Cut Backup Times, Meet HIPAA Regulations More Efficiently

Customer Overview

The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center has been fighting cancer for over 35 years. It is the only comprehensive radiation therapy treatment center in the region offering tailored solutions to complex cancer care and non-cancerous conditions. Its expert treatment team is the largest and most experienced in Louisiana, treating more patients with radiation therapy than any other facility in the state. Mary Bird Perkins is also home to the state’s largest medical physics team, experts who work closely with physicians to best plan a patient’s care. Through accreditation with Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center in Baton Rouge and St. Tammany Parish Hospital in Covington, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center is able to offer patients the most advanced continuum of cancer care available. Its combined resources allow local residents to seek treatment close to home where innovative, world-class treatment is right in their own backyard. The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center is based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Key Benefits:

  • Backup window reduced by 6 hours
  • Complies with stringent HIPAA regulations
  • Straightforward setup and easy management
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • ExaGrid is easily scalable to support future data growth
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Long Backups Led to Network Performance Issues

The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center is a growing medical facility with five locations. The Center has a Citrix environment and backs up over 2TB of data each night, but its IT staff was having difficulty properly backing up data with tape. In particular, network performance had begun to suffer due to long backup times.

“With tape, our backups were taking over 20 hours to complete and our network was suffering. In one instance, we had to cancel the backup job because we were requesting data from a database and the system was slowing down. As a healthcare facility, we need to adhere to stringent HIPAA regulations governing backups and we found that we simply couldn’t do that efficiently with tape,” said Kevin Walker, network administrator for The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center. “We needed a solution that would shorten our backup times and provide a more reliable way for us to store and retrieve data.”

"The ExaGrid system does a great job at reducing our data so we can keep more data onsite and available for restores. We don’t have to do individual restores often, but as part of HIPAA, we need to set up test environments to show we can restore data. The ExaGrid system makes restores easy because the data is always available to us and we don’t have to mess with tape. "

Kevin Walker, Network Administrator

ExaGrid Reduces Nightly Backup Times

The Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center chose a disk-based backup solution with data deduplication from ExaGrid to work alongside the facility’s existing backup application, Veritas Backup Exec. The ExaGrid appliance is located in its Baton Rouge datacenter and backs up all the facility’s data, including medical records and business data.

Since installing ExaGrid, Walker reports that nightly differential backup times have been cut by 6 hours. “Our backup times have been cut considerably and we’re now able to fully complete our backup each and every night,” said Walker. “Also, the ExaGrid appliance does a great job at reducing our data so we can keep more data on-site and available for restores. We don’t have to do individual restores often, but as part of HIPAA, we need to set up test environments to show we can restore data. The ExaGrid system makes restores easy because the data is always available to us and we don’t have to mess with tape.”

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).

Ability to Add Second System for Data Replication, Scalability to Meet Future Demands

Currently, the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Care Center backs the ExaGrid system up to tape, however the facility is planning to install a second ExaGrid system offsite to provide data replication and enhance disaster recovery efforts.

“We like the fact that we can add a second system in the future to further eliminate tape. It gives us a lot of flexibility. And as we grow, the system can be expanded easily to accommodate even more data,” said Walker.

As a growing healthcare facility, scalability was also an important factor in choosing the ExaGrid system. ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

Easy Setup, Responsive Customer Support

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. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

“We were able to set the ExaGrid system up ourselves and it was very straightforward. From the outset, we have had a terrific relationship with our ExaGrid customer support engineer. He’s extremely knowledgeable and he’s always checking to ensure that the system is working correctly,” said Walker. “We’ve been very pleased with the ExaGrid system. Our backup times have improved tremendously, and we don’t have issues with our backups affecting system performance anymore.”

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups.

Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

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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