The Commvault solution is also significantly less expensive than MCMH’s previous system and provides efficiencies that free up a full-time employee to focus on other tasks.
“In a health information system, having reliable backup and disaster recovery is the most important thing you can have,” Koppa says. “If you can’t trust that it can bring your systems back from a disaster, then it serves you no good purpose.”
Ease of Use Provides Speed and Efficiency
These days, tape systems are largely relegated to long-term archiving, says Charles King, president and principal analyst for Pund-IT.
“Dedicated healthcare solutions, like those offered by Commvault, Veeam and other vendors, offer healthcare organizations the performance qualities they require and are designed to support critical document security and compliance functions,” he says.
Floyd Medical Center, a not-for-profit system of three hospitals and multiple primary care clinics in Georgia and Alabama, had been taking hourly snapshots of all the system’s virtual machines to back up its 750TB of live data, says IT director Lee Jones.
But the solution was far from ideal. “It was a miserable experience,” says Jones. “We couldn’t see into the data to know if our servers had been successfully backed up or not, and occasionally the backups would be corrupted.”