Martha Jefferson Hospital performs healthy backups with STORServer EZ Backup Appliance Built on IBM Express

Martha Jefferson Hospital is renowned for delivering the finest in health care to residents of the eight counties surrounding its Charlottesville, Virginia, location. Central to its mission to enhance, maintain and restore the personal health and well-being of each of its patients is the not-for-profit facility’s commitment to employing the latest and best technology—from state-of-the-art linear accelerators to treat cancer to a powerful electronic medical record system that ensures the right patient information is readily available to physicians to optimize treatment decisions.

Protecting clinical and administrative data is critical to the hospital’s day-to-day operations. Each day, the Martha Jefferson IT team had to backup more than 34 servers, and as new technologies and medical applications emerged, the amount of patient medical histories, prescription records, test results and billing information to be stored continued to skyrocket.

For many years, the facility depended on a combination of software and hardware backup solutions from multiple vendors, which included a tape cartridge system. However, the system became increasingly unreliable as the amount of data grew and integration issues wasted huge amounts of time troubleshooting problems. “As we moved toward totally electronic systems, this situation was completely unacceptable,” says Preston Miller, senior systems engineer at Martha Jefferson Hospital. “What’s more, I was spending 30 percent of my time trying to figure out what went wrong while our vendors pointed fingers at each other with the problems.”

IBM provides cure with reliability and speed
In addition to planned changes to comply with HIPAA regulations, Martha Jefferson was planning to implement innovations such as patient and medication barcode scanning. Backups were already taking almost 24 hours, with the backup team working long nights trying to accommodate the data volume. Furthermore, a slow backup or spike in data growth would sometimes push backups into the next business day—and trying to restore data for end users could take hours. Miller decided it was time for a more efficient and reliable backup system.

After talking to current vendors and evaluating current needs and growth requirements, Miller sent out a request for proposal to five major vendors and put together an evaluation committee. After reviewing the proposals, the committee concluded that the STORServer EZ Backup Appliance offered the best combination of hardware and software integration, storage capacity and customer support.

Best-of-breed with one point of contact
“We wanted one company with a best-of-breed solution to take full ownership with just one phone call,” says Miller. “The system had to encompass all of the required hardware and software, be reliable and easy-to-use and require very little maintenance. I wanted to simply be able to read a report and know that a backup was successful. And in the event of a problem, I wanted to be able to place a single call to a single vendor that has a comprehensive understanding of our deployment so they can expertly troubleshoot for us.”

Miller was impressed with the knowledge of the STORServer team and the dashboard interface designed by STORServer that is designed to simplify Tivoli management functions. STORServer provided a test unit to demonstrate the system’s capabilities and within 30 minutes it was running and backing up processes. “We were all amazed,” Miller says. “I don’t know of any other system I’ve been able to implement so quickly.”

The hospital chose the STORServer EZ Backup Appliance, qualified as Built on IBM Express, as a cost-effective solution for small and medium-sized businesses. The hospital’s STORServer EZ Backup Appliance uses a combination of disk-to-disk and disk-to-tape backup storage. Its disk-to-tape backups are handled by an IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library featuring fibre channel Linear Tape Open (LTO) drives. This ultra-high capacity tape storage system is designed to combine high performance, capacity and reliability with significant data compression and error correction functionality.

In addition, STORServer provides one-call support for any component of the system, remote diagnostics and a maximum four-hour response time.

Increased capacity with reduced time
Miller was delighted with how fast the STORServer team got the new backup system up and running. “After the STORServer and tape library arrived, the engineers connected the system and fired it up all on the first day,” he says. “Everything was accurately configured from the start. During the training class we loaded the clients, and the system was backing up from then on. We had counted on one to two weeks of downtime, yet everything was operational within three days and has been running flawlessly ever since.”

Today, Martha Jefferson is successfully backing up more than 40 terabytes of data on 57 servers each day—and counting. Yet Miller now spends only a fraction of his time on backup tasks. “Before we implemented the STORServer EZ Backup Appliance, I was spending 30 percent of my time on backup issues,” says Miller. “Now, it’s probably less than three percent. I receive all the reports automatically each morning, and if I need any more information, I can access the system remotely. The one stop support has been phenomenal. With just one phone call, issues have been resolved in just a few hours.”

Furthermore, the increased capacity and speed of backups mean his staff no longer spends all night managing backup. Manual processes take about an hour each night at a remote disaster recovery site. And instead of 24 hours, backups now take six hours. This time savings has enabled IT staff to focus on other IT needs in the hospital and helps Miller to plan his resources more efficiently.

IBM Tivoli Storage Management software combines power and ease
The system’s ease of manageability has also helped Miller improve resource efficiency. The robust functionality of Tivoli Storage Management software provides the hospital with a single tool to manage and automate the entirety of its backup, archiving, space management and restoration activities.

“The intuitive and easy to use interface manager harnesses the sophistication of the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and allows me a lot of flexibility, including managing the backup tape library and determining who can access it,” Miller explains. “I can even go beyond the Microsoft® Windows® interface with command line access to the data services manager and directly modify the data routing processes and policies if necessary.” This flexibility provides powerful storage management features that help reduce manual operations and are designed to enable monitoring and policy-setting, helping small and medium businesses improve storage efficiency and retain data.

IBM and STORServer enhance comfort and cure
For end users at the hospital, the STORServer EZ Backup Appliance is designed to provide a rapid restore for data. “Data that used to take two to four hours to restore, such as misplaced or corrupted files, can now often be recovered in a matter of minutes by our help desk staff,” Miller explains. “The end users noticed that right away—and we think this has helped increase their productivity.”

As an early adopter of new technological health care initiatives, Martha Jefferson Hospital continues to add servers and expand storage capacity that supports state-of-the-art patient care. From radiation treatment planning to bedside e-mail access, patient care is the top priority. “Everybody has to wear multiple hats and be productive as we work toward improving patient care. The STORServer EZ Backup Appliance has given us more time and space to work on our core mission.”

STORServer EZ Backup has also qualified as IBM System Storage Proven™, a program designed to help clients identify storage solutions that have been pre-qualified for interoperability with IBM System Storage products.

For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at:

www-03.ibm.com/servers/storage/proven/index.html