Blessing Hospital Opts for CommVault Simpana

CommVault announced that Blessing Hospital, an Illinois based hospital serving area residents since 1875, is using CommVault Simpana 7.0 software to maintain high availability of its critical and confidential patient data and helping staff deliver high quality, accessible healthcare. CommVault software also helps Blessing ensure business continuity in the face of planned and unplanned downtime and comply with regulatory requirements for data retention and availability. Using innovative new features from CommVault including Single Instance Store (SIS), Blessing now boasts approximately 60 percent faster data recoverability since making the switch from Symantec Veritas Backup Exec.

With two main hospitals and multiple clinics in rural communities throughout Illinois, Blessing treats patients with critical injuries at its trauma center, also offering a helicopter airlift service to other, more specialized hospitals in the St. Louis area. As Blessing caters to both long-term and overnight patients, there is a constant flow of new and updated information required in order to meet Blessing’s stringent patient care standards. The hospital’s reliance on 24/7 accessibility to patient information makes high availability of systems and data a top priority.

"CommVault Simpana suite provides two critical capabilities for Blessing: it protects vital patient data and helps us comply with regulations, such as the stringent Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)," said Doug Barry, technical support analyst at Blessing. "Prior to deploying CommVault software, we spent significant resources focused on backups, but still couldn’t meet our backup window which jeopardized the availability of our data. Using CommVault Simpana, we reduced our backup time by almost 80 percent. We can now protect 1.1TB worth of data across all our 150 Windows servers in less than 30 minutes, and are confident that the data is highly recoverable if we need it."

Blessing had been conducting staggered full backups with the incremental on alternate nights, but this backup strategy still could not fit in required backup windows and left the IT department with zero planned down time for upgrades or maintenance. While an expanded 25 terabyte (TB) SAN and disk-to-disk solution helped ease some of the performance issues, ensuring system and data availability continued to be a concern as the backup software regularly crashed backups. As the existing backup software approached end of life, Blessing faced a forklift upgrade decision that would require uninstalling its current version and then reinstalling a newer version, further impacting its ability to maintain high data availability.

Upgrades to Symantec Veritas Netbackup, EMC Networker and CommVault Simpana Data Protection were looked into. Ultimately the decision was made to evaluate all three solutions using the exact same hardware, backing up the same data, and then restoring it to the same server – a true side by side comparison. In the end, Blessing turned to CommVault to help mitigate risk, improve performance and ensure reliable data recovery of its essential patient records, images and day-to-day files. With a uniquely singular approach, CommVault Simpana Data Protection offers backup capabilities from one central point of control and its integrated SIS feature helps to remove redundant files from each backup to save space and increase backup speeds.

"Now we can transfer 16TB of data every week with only one backup server, and the system is both more robust and faster," said Barry. "We have reduced the volume of daily backups by as much as 65 percent. Instead of worrying that our backups won’t complete on time or at all, we rest easy knowing that CommVault SIS has sped up the entire process because we’re transferring less data. It’s a backup and storage revolution!"

In addition, Barry points to other benefits of using CommVault SIS, including the ability to retain more data for longer periods of time using the space saved. SIS can help Blessing meet retention requirements without needing to continually add storage capacity to keep up with additional data, particularly important in the healthcare industry which has strict retention policies around patient records. By more efficiently managing its data storage, reducing the administrative overhead required to manage its backups and maintaining higher levels of uptime, Blessing has also seen major tangible cost savings that are still being realized to date.

Blessing Hospital

CommVault