Springfield Clinic

Springfield Clinic Chooses ExaGrid to Keep Pace with Growing Data Volumes and Retention Requirements

Customer Overview

Springfield Clinic is dedicated to preserving the trusted patient-provider relationships they have carefully developed through 82 years of serving reliable, primary and specialized health care. With more than 600 physicians and mid-level providers practicing in nearly 80 medical specialties and sub-specialties, Springfield Clinic serves a population of nearly one million patients throughout the central Illinois region.

Key Benefits:

Retention increased from 2 to 12 months
Restores done in a few keystrokes
Dedupe rates up to 40:1
Scalable architecture provides for system expansion as data increases
Works ‘flawlessly’ with Arcserve

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Need for More Retention, Less Management Led to ExaGrid

Springfield Clinic began looking for an alternative to tape in an effort to increase retention and reduce the amount of man hours its IT department was spending on managing backups each week. “As a healthcare provider, we need to have access to a significant amount of retention to adhere to HIPAA regulations,” said Kevin Jordan, systems administrator at Springfield Clinic. “With our old tape solution, we were only able to keep about two months of data on hand without having to go back to our archived tapes. Finally, we decided to look for a new solution capable of improving retention and accessibility to stored data.”

"As a healthcare provider, we need to have access to a significant amount of retention to adhere to HIPAA regulations ... Because of ExaGrid’s strong data deduplication technology ... we’re seeing data deduplication ratios as high as 40:1. "

Kevin Jordan, Systems Administrator

Cost-Effective ExaGrid System Improves Retention, Backup Efficiency

Springfield Clinic chose ExaGrid after also considering products including Quantum and Dell EMC’s Data Domain and Avamar. The clinic installed a single ExaGrid appliance, then added a second, and is planning to install a third later this year. The system provides primary backup for Springfield Clinic’s approximately 100 virtual and 80 physical servers. The ExaGrid system works along with the organization’s existing backup application, Arcserve.

“The ExaGrid system was extremely cost effective, and we were impressed with its stability and reliability – it’s tried and true,” said Jordan. “We also liked its post-process data deduplication approach better than the other products we looked at. Because the data is backed up to the ExaGrid before the deduplication process is initiated, backups run as efficiently as possible.”

Up to 40:1 Data Deduplication Maximizes Data Stored

Jordan said that some full backup jobs used to run 48-plus hours, but backup times overall have been significantly reduced since installing the ExaGrid system. Retention has improved, too, and the clinic now stores nearly 12 months of data on the system.

“Because of ExaGrid’s strong data deduplication technology, we’re keeping approximately 331TB of data on the system in about 17.9TB of space, and we’re seeing data deduplication ratios as high as 40:1,” he said. “Having that much data online and available to us is wonderful. We’re able to restore any file with just a few keystrokes, and it makes adhering to HIPAA regulations so much easier.”

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).

Easy Management, Top-Notch Customer Support

Jordan said the ExaGrid is easy to manage, thanks to its intuitive interface and superior customer support.

“The ExaGrid system is very straightforward to manage, but if I do have an issue, I know I can count on our assigned support engineer. He’s easy to reach and knows the system inside and out,” said Jordan. “Our support engineer simply remotes in if we have a problem and can resolve any issue quickly. The ExaGrid is a solid solution that works flawlessly with ARCserve.”

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.

Scale-out Architecture Ensures Smooth Scalability

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

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. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

Since initially installing the ExaGrid system, Springfield Clinic has expanded the system to handle more data and is planning to expand it even further in the coming months. “Our data is constantly growing and the ExaGrid system’s scale-out architecture enables us to easily keep up with our backup demands. It’s extremely easy to expand the system by racking up another unit, daisy chaining them together, making a simple network connection, and calling into our support engineer for configuration assistance,” Jordan said. “We’ve been very pleased with the ExaGrid system. It’s helped us reduce our reliance on tape and improve retention.”

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).

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.

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