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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Hospital Hits Capacity with Data Domain, Opts for ExaGrid to Ensure Future Scalability

Customer Overview

Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall is a not-for-profit hospital dedicated to serving the health care needs of those in the Hudson Valley. In January 2002, St. Luke’s Hospital and The Cornwall Hospital merged to create an integrated health care delivery system, providing quality comprehensive health care services. In January 2018, St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital officially partnered with the Montefiore Health System, making MSLC part of the leading organization in the country for population health management. With dedicated staff, modern facilities and state-of-the-art treatment, Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall is committed to meeting the needs of the community and continuing to aspire to excellence. Each year the organization cares for more than 270,000 patients from around the Hudson Valley. With 1,500 employees, the hospital is one of the largest employers in Orange County. The Newburgh campus was founded in 1874 by women of St. George’s Church. The Cornwall campus was established in 1931.

Key Benefits:

  • ExaGrid’s scalability ensures that SLCH will never face another forklift upgrade
  • System can be scaled commensurate with hospital’s data growth
  • Backups now complete in hours instead of days
  • IT staff now spends ‘almost no time’ on backup
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EMRs Present Backup Storage Challenges

Like all other hospitals, SLCH had taken the plunge into EMRs and digital records, which required a lot of space for both production as well as backups. The hospital had been using Meditech as its EMR system, Bridgehead with Dell EMC Data Domain for backups, and offsite tape copies for disaster recovery. However, the hospital got to a point where it was no longer possible to do daily backups because of how long they were taking and had to resort to backing up only three times a week instead.

"I was really put off by Dell EMC when they told me I had to buy all new gear, and our Data Domain system wasn’t even that old. If I bought a new Data Domain, after I ported everything over, I would have had to just throw the old one away. For what we needed, the cost for a whole new Data Domain system was literally immense. "

Jim Gessman, Systems Administrator

Backups Constantly Running, Restores ‘Risky’

Prior to ExaGrid, the hospital had been using physical tape as well as Data Domain to virtual tape, and the biggest problem, according to Jim Gessman, systems administrator at SLCH, was that backups were painfully slow. “It took forever to get backups done, and it got to a point where backups were taking so long that they were constantly running. We need to keep a lot of historical data, and with EMRs and digital records, we need a lot of space for backups.”

In addition to painfully slow backups, deduplication wasn’t running correctly on the Data Domain system, and SLCH was running out of capacity. “When we had a failure, we’d have to restart. Given how long it took to back up, I didn’t want to attempt a restore – fortunately, we never needed to but if we had, it would have been painful, and we knew we were taking that risk. Overall, it just wasn’t meeting our needs,” said Gessman.

SLCH Faces Costly Forklift Upgrade with Data Domain

When St. Luke’s first ran out of capacity on its Data Domain system, the hospital was able to do one upgrade, but when it happened again, Gessman was surprised to learn that it couldn’t be expanded further. He was told that he needed a whole new system in order to add the capacity the hospital needed to keep pace with its data growth.

“I was really put off by Dell EMC when they told me I had to buy all new gear, and our Data Domain system wasn’t even that old. If I bought a new Data Domain, after I ported everything over, I would have had to just throw the old one away. For what we needed, the cost for a whole new Data Domain system was literally immense. It really came down to the fact that if I was going to have to spend that much money for a new Data Domain, I’d much rather purchase something new that offers much more flexibility. So we started to look at other options.”

ExaGrid Scale-Out Architecture Proves to be ‘Much Better Fit’

When he was comparing Data Domain, ExaGrid, and one other backup storage product, there were a number of things that tipped the scales for Gessman and made his decision to purchase ExaGrid an easy one – ease of use, cost, and future expandability. “When we looked at ExaGrid, it seemed to be a much better fit, especially in the area of scalability.” Gessman felt comfortable that he would never outgrow the ExaGrid system.

“In the future, when we have more data to back up and we need to grow the system a little, great. If we need to grow the system a lot, we can do that too.” 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.

Easy to Install and Maintain

The ExaGrid system is easy to install and use and works seamlessly with the industry’s leading backup applications so that an organization can retain its investment in its existing backup applications and processes. In addition, ExaGrid appliances can replicate to a second ExaGrid appliance at a second site or to the public cloud for DR (disaster recovery). Gessman reports that his ExaGrid system was up and running within a few hours and has found that the time he spends on backup is far less than it used to be. “I spend almost no time on backup now. I forget about it sometimes – no kidding. It’s that good! I look at the daily backup report that ExaGrid generates, and it’s always fine. I haven’t had any issues with running out of space or failing because it choked. It just runs. We can actually do daily backups now, because the jobs are completing in a matter of hours instead of days.”

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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