Fox Chase Cancer Center speeds data backup and recovery with IBM ProtecTIER Deduplication Solutions

Founded in 1904 in Philadelphia as one of the nation’s first cancer hospitals, Fox Chase Cancer Center is today one of the leading cancer research and treatment centers in the United States. Fox Chase researchers have won the highest awards in their fields, Fox Chase physicians are routinely recognized in national rankings, and the Fox Chase nursing program has been recognized for excellence multiple times.

As a premier center for cancer research and treatments, Fox Chase manages critical data ranging from patient records to research information. The center participates in about 90 research programs at any given time. The IT infrastructure must operate at the highest levels of efficiency to manage this data, to keep from siphoning funding resources away from the center’s primary work in research and treatment.

Coping with the hidden consequences of robust growth

With the formidable technology resources that Fox Chase has at its disposal, the center can render MRI images in minutes instead of hours; produce scans that offer 16 times the resolution they once did; and generate more gene-sequencing data for DNA analysis in a day than they used to do in a month. That’s the good news. The downside is that the constant advances in technology are causing an explosion of electronic information. That information must be carefully stored and protected so that it is always secure yet readily available when needed.

One of the greatest challenges for Fox Chase has been to keep pace with the backup requirements imposed by ever-growing amounts of data. At one point, their servers were generating an estimated terabyte of new information every month, and, as a result, the nightly backup window was quickly expanding from 12 hours to 13 or 14 hours. Weekend backups were also extending past their allotted time.

“We were actually having to make hard choices about which servers to back up,” recalls Karl Barth, Director of Systems and Operations for Fox Chase. Equally troubling was the fact that requests to restore data took hours of staff time—or even days if restoring information involved recalling storage tapes from off-site locations.

Weighing the alternatives

Fox Chase initially saw two options for dealing with the growing volumes of data, and both of them were going to be costly, complex and disruptive to implement. The first was a “rip and replace” approach that would involve replacing the center’s entire tape library and the existing tape drives that were being used for backing up data. The old drives would be converted to new, higher-capacity LTO3 drives, and the data on the old tapes would be migrated to tapes designed to be used with the new drives. This wholesale change would not only be expensive, it would also require Fox Chase to change its backup processes.

Fox Chase also considered an option that would save money by keeping the existing tape library, supplementing it with a second library and splitting the workload between them. However, tapes created on the new library would be incompatible with the old system, creating a new set of challenges for storage management and disaster recovery. It quickly became apparent that while this option might be less expensive to deploy than the first, it could very well end up costing too much in terms of increased operational complexity. The problem with both options was that as data continued to grow, the organization could ultimately find itself in the same predicament in the future: out of capacity, and facing the expense of replacing or adding to its backup infrastructure.

Taking into account the cost, complexity and lack of scalability posed by the traditional choices for expanding its backup capabilities, Fox Chase ultimately looked to a third choice: a virtual tape library made possible by a newer technology called data deduplication. In data deduplication, redundant backup data is eliminated to reduce the amount of backup disk storage capacity required.

At the time Fox Chase was considering its options, the technology was new and posed somewhat of a risk. Fox Chase elected to go with IBM ProtecTIER® Deduplication Solutions after speaking in depth with two existing customers, reviewing solution documentation, and installing an evaluation system on-site. “We knew it was what we wanted,” says Barth. “Adding newer, larger capacity tapes to our environment would’ve been a bigger project. Even if the price was a wash, we wanted and needed something more flexible and scalable. Electronic recovery versus physical was how we looked at it. ProtecTIER gives us the data protection and recovery we need.”

Giving backup systems a new lease on life

Fox Chase worked with IBM Premier Business Partner Continental Resources, Inc., to roll out the ProtecTIER solution, which was delivered on an IBM System x® server with four quad-core Intel® CPUs, 32 GB of memory, and eight fibre channel ports. Symantec’s NetBackup is the backup software.

Barth says the organization has achieved a 12:1 data reduction ratio with ProtecTIER. This goes far beyond the 90 percent reduction in physical storage requirements represented by a 10:1 ratio. With the ProtecTIER solution in place, Fox Chase is able to back up 2 to 3 TB of data per night while still staying well within their backup window. “Our processes have stayed the same,” explains Barth. “Backups just finish more quickly.” He says that the backup window has dropped to about half, enabling them to expand backup services.

Fox Chase keeps two to four weeks of backups on the ProtecTIER virtual tape library (VTL). Tapes are created weekly and stored off-site. Monthly synthetic full backups are created using the GFS (grandfather, father, son) model of tape rotation. “It’s really nice to have those weeks of backups online because our recovery times are easy and quick,” notes Barth. “The quality of service to users is much better. Before ProtecTIER, we had to spin tapes, which took two to four hours at best. Now, the typical restore request takes five minutes.”

Extending the value of the ProtecTIER solution

Given the success Fox Chase has experienced with the ProtecTIER deduplication solution at its primary location, they are now looking at installing a similar solution in their remote data center in Warminster, Pennsylvania, about 12 miles away. This installation will make ProtecTIER Deduplication Solutions part of their disaster recovery plan.

“Instead of moving tapes off-site, we can electronically transmit data from one site to the other,” says Barth. “Recovery of deduplicated data will take much less time this way. Our goal is to be able to recover any critical server in the remote facility within four hours.”

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner. Visit us at: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts7650g/index.html

For more information about Fox Chase Cancer Center, visit: www.fccc.edu

For more information about Continental Resources, visit: www.continentalresources.com