Data Protection, Archiving, Storage Management, and High Availability

Executive Summary

Overview
Mississippi Baptist Health Systems (MBHS) is the largest private general hospital in Mississippi. From its modest beginnings in 1908 as a clinic run by two physicians, MBHS is now a major medical center, with nearly 600 patient beds and a variety of health and medical services for patients of all ages. The information services (IS) department at the hospital is a centralized operation, with one data center that supports the main hospital and eight outlying clinics. The IS department has more than 55 full-time staff members, including seven network engineers.

Barriers
The nature of MBHS’ work requires instantaneous access to electronic medical records that impact patient care. The hospital’s distributed network of patient-care locations, however, hampered the ability of staffers to gain immediate access to archived health records. The IS department noted that a major communications barrier stemmed from the way information was stored: data was housed in hundreds of “siloed” servers, underutilizing 95 percent of the storage space. At the same time, archive data volumes grew from 10 terabytes (TB) in 2004 to 130 TB in 2009, a pace expected to continue. MBHS, therefore, needed a way to simultaneously manage this growth and contain costs. The existing backup-and-recovery solution was heterogeneous and unreliable, resulting in unacceptably long delays for patients and doctors to access requested files. Further complicating matters, the hospital faced numerous compliance and governance challenges—stemming from the need to meet federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as well as state regulations and hospital quality standards—that required a more robust and efficient storage management solution.

The Solution
To address these challenges, MBHS worked together with Symantec and Symantec partner, IBM, to launch a four-phase effort to overhaul and upgrade its storage infrastructure within MBHS’ budgetary requirements. The process is proceeding according to the following steps:

• Phase 1 — Consolidated hospital data onto an IBM enterprise disk storage system and standardized backup operations on Veritas NetBackup 6.0.
• Phase 2 — Consolidated all backup and archive data—previously distributed across five backup libraries using three software tools—onto an IBM enterprise tape library using Veritas NetBackup 6.0 and Symantec Enterprise Vault File System Archiving.
• Phase 3 — Improved performance and reduced redundancy in the high-speed IBM server environment with Veritas Storage Foundation HA providing volume management for the Symantec Enterprise Vault System Archiving and Veritas NetBackup servers. Added failover capabilities during maintenance of the backup server by implementing Veritas Cluster Server. Worked with Symantec Business Critical Services to troubleshoot any problems in the new archiving and data protection systems.
• Phase 4 — Creating a disaster recovery data center that completes the storage manage- ment upgrade for MBHS.
Benefits

A Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group found that the Symantec and IBM backup, archiving, clustering, and storage management solutions will produce the following tangible business values for MBHS from January 2005 through December 2009:

• Backup Labor Productivity Gains and Cost Avoidance: $843,792 in real and pro- jected IS labor cost avoidance and productivity gains realized from January 2005 through December 2009 by consolidating backup-and-recovery operations with Veritas NetBackup.
• Storage Solution Cost Avoidance: $2,393,333 in real and projected storage cost avoid- ance from March 2007 through December 2009 by using Symantec Enterprise Vault File System Archiving to deduplicate file system data and house it in less expensive storage tiers.
• High-Availability Hardware Cost Avoidance and IS Storage Productivity Gains: $52,172 in real and projected cost-avoidance and productivity gains from March 2007 through December 2009 by using Veritas Storage Foundation HA.
• Archived File Retrieval End-User and IS Productivity Gains: $94,278 in real and projected productivity gains for both end users and IS staff members from March 2007 through December 2009 with faster retrieval of archived data using Symantec Enterprise Vault File System Archiving.
• Backup Data-Retrieval, End-User Productivity, and IS Productivity Gains: $37,766 in real and projected productivity gains for both end users and IS staff members from March 2007 through December 2009 with faster retrieval of files from backed up data using Symantec Enterprise Vault File System Archiving.

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