Roger Williams Medical Center Selects Data Domain

Data Domain announced that the Roger Williams Medical Center (RWMC) has implemented Data Domain to accelerate and simplify its backup, restore and disaster recovery (DR) processes. The hospital also cites fast time-to-DR, reduced management, improved reliability, significantly increased usable capacity and a scaleable architecture as benefits realized from its Data Domain systems.

A teaching affiliate of the Boston University School of Medicine, RWMC offers its patients medical and emergency care, specialty surgery and advanced diagnostic facilities. As RWMC’s Lead Technical Engineer Andrew Fuss explains, prior to deploying their Data Domain system, "we suffered from all the traditional issues with tape backup, including slow and problematic restores and difficulties meeting our backup window. We were also sinking way too much time into managing our processes."

Following a brief evaluation, RWMC deployed two Data Domain DD565s, one at the hospital data center and one at a DR site approximately 100 miles away. Data Domain Replicator software was used to enable secure network-based replication of their backups, which include the Meditech database that runs the entire hospital management system as well as Exchange files, SQL server, Oracle and PACS systems data. The implementation required no changes to their backup policies or their existing EMC NetWorker backup software, and compression rates of 20x to 40x are being achieved on the various types of data.

"We did not even end up taking the full 30 days to evaluate the product — we knew after just 10 days that we wanted to deploy Data Domain," said Fuss. "The difference with Data Domain is that it just works; it’s simple. Other solutions that we looked at were not only costly, but complex and extremely labor intensive to get up and running, with longer implementation times. We evaluated a variety of other solutions and did not find anything close to Data Domain’s customer base of large scale implementations, which is what we wanted to see."

Another capability that attracted RWMC to Data Domain is the flexibility to work with multiple backup software solutions simultaneously, enabling the hospital to explore different backup strategies. In this regard, RWMC is currently looking at backing up the hospital’s virtualized VMware servers to its Data Domain systems via Vizioncore backup software.

"We’re pleased to add Roger Williams Medical Center to the growing list of hospitals and medical centers who have proactively addressed their data protection issues with our systems," said Beth White, Vice President of Marketing for Data Domain. "RWMC’s implementation underscores the flexibility of our systems to perform across a variety of data types and work with multiple backup software offerings."

"Data Domain was the answer we were looking for," adds Fuss. "Our restore times are amazing. What would have been a three hour project to recover a file from tape has been reduced to three minutes. The recovery speed alone saves us an untold number of hours."