Dayton Children’s Hospital Enjoys Pain-free Data Protection for 9 Years with STORServer Backup Appliances
Executive Summary
Company: Dayton Children’s Hospital
Industry: Healthcare
Employees: 1,400+
Revenue: $417 million (2014)
Business Challenges:
- Manual backup management
- Capacity constraints
STORServer Solutions:
- Tivoli Storage Manager with STORServer Console
- Enterprise Backup Appliance
The mission of Dayton Children’s Hospital in Ohio is to improve the health of all children through service, education, research and advocacy. One of the largest pediatric healthcare providers in the Miami Valley region, it has 155 beds with 250 physicians and 600 nurses who treat 290,000 children each year. It’s quickly gaining a national reputation with the Magnet® designation for excellence in nursing care, which only seven percent of health care organizations in the world attain. Using cutting edge technology to deliver better services is a core part of its vision to be the first choice for children’s health as an independent, locally-governed children’s hospital.
Simplifying Backup with a Powerful, Flexible Appliance
In 2006, Dayton Children’s relied on tape backups to protect its IT infrastructure against possible failure. However, tapes required a highly manual process and their IT staff often ran out of backup space. The IT team decided they needed to explore more automated methods of protecting and managing data. Working with Advanced Data Recovery Systems, an Ohio solutions provider, Dayton Children’s ultimately selected STORServer and has not looked back, even nine years later.
Data growth and expansion were addressed in 2009 with an upgrade to the hospital’s existing STORServer appliance. As part of the hospital’s IT team, network analyst Jennifer Lucas supports the hospital’s data protection, mobility initiatives, voice over IP, and wireless communication efforts. “We decided to stick with STORServer because it has a great track record for industry leadership. Their system could support the capacity we needed and the support, stability, and ease of use made it among the top two in the market,” said Lucas.
Most recently, the IT team deployed the STORServer Enterprise Backup Appliance powered byIBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager (TSM) and migrated data to the newer system in less than 48 hours. Built-to-order and factory configured to the hospital’s demanding specifications, the STORServer appliance was installed in one day, and Lucas began backing up applications on day two. She found the management console developed by STORServer to be extremely intuitive for managing backup, archive, and recovery operations. “The STORServer Console makes it easy to set up a backup and confirm that it ran. If the backup is good, it’s pretty easy to restore,” said Lucas. “I used to spend a couple of hours a day working with backups. Now it’s maybe an hour a week if that. Most weeks less than 15 minutes in total. I feel confident in the STORServer system.”
Safeguarding Innovative Healthcare Technology and Pediatric Medications
Since going with STORServer, the IT team has not lost any data protected by STORServer. This is especially important as part of its Destination 2020 strategy; the hospital is continuing to add new clinics and integrate them with medical platforms such as EPIC. The IT team has to implement multiple new systems while keeping the existing infrastructure running, without adding significant staff or resources.
For instance, one very important application that has its data protected by STORServer is the temperature monitoring system for refrigeration units. These units store items such as medications, dietary supplements, and newborn intensive care supplies in various locations throughout the hospital. If the temperature in any of these units falls out of specified parameters, alerts inform designated individuals of the type and location of the device that is failing so staff can react quickly.
Certain medications and supplements have very narrow temperature tolerances and if the refrigeration unit falls out of that range even for a short time, hospital staff must dispose of it. As Lucas explained, “If we don’t react in a timely manner, we run the risk of delaying specialized medications and supplements being available for our patients, not to mention the huge risk and monetary loss for the hospital. The backup for all that data has to be foolproof.” In addition to the temperature-monitoring platform, more than two dozen other applications are protected by STORServer. These include primary systems include Epic, Digisonics, Airwatch, and MobileView.
As additional capacity is needed, Lucas can easily add more disk shelves to expand the STORServer appliance without a forklift upgrade. The hospital now has predictable data protection with a noticeable improvement in performance and scale. Lucas concluded, “Backup times are definitely faster and we are spending less time manually babysitting the server. End users probably have never noticed anything but there would have been fewer system backups running over into the next business day, therefore less complaining about system slowness in the mornings. The staff, doctors, and nurses don’t know the cause; they just know they’re now happy.”
