MultiCare Health System Deployed Sepaton

SEPATON, Inc. announced that MultiCare Health System, an integrated health organization, has deployed the SEPATON S2100-ES2 virtual tape library (VTL) with DeltaStor software for data deduplication and increased its backup performance dramatically, retained more data online for faster restores, and created a platform that scales easily to support an estimated twenty percent compounded annual data growth rate.

MultiCare’s IT environment includes four data centers in the Tacoma, Washington, area that service four hospitals, numerous primary care and urgent care clinics, multi-specialty centers, hospice and home health services, and many other healthcare services. It supports both patients and more than 10,000 employees who need continuous, round-the-clock access to patient files, lab results and medical information. Their storage infrastructure consists of a 400 TB SAN for UNIX, Windows and Linux servers. They use Symantec NetBackup backup software to protect their Windows servers and HP Data Protector for their UNIX and Linux systems.

Confronted with growing data volumes and shrinking backup windows, Eric Zuspan, senior system administrator of SAN / UNIX for MultiCare Health System, knew he had to find an alternative to burdensome and unreliable physical tape libraries. "Our administrative staff spent far too much time serving as tape jockeys. We needed to relieve them of repetitive manual tasks so they could work on activities that improve our service levels, and contain our costs, such as fine-tuning performance, improving system utilization, writing time-saving scripts, and other value-added tasks. In addition to draining manpower, our tape systems were also slowing our backup performance. Incremental backups weren’t an option for improving backup times because they would have made restoring data from multiple tapes slow and cumbersome. To comply with regulatory requirements, we would have had to keep all of the tapes needed to provide a complete restore on hand at all times. As a result, our online retention time was limited to only one week."

Zuspan set out to evaluate virtual tape libraries. His three most important criteria were high performance, scalability, and deduplication. He needed a system that could backup and restore large volumes of data as quickly as possible. He also wanted the ability to add capacity and performance easily and cost-effectively, without buying a whole new system. He also wanted data deduplication to offset his data growth and drive down his total cost of ownership.

SEPATON Rated First in Enterprise-Class Deduplication
MultiCare was introduced to SEPATON by its technology partner. MultiCare was also considering a deduplication product from Diligent (now part of IBM). "SEPATON and Diligent are the only products that can provide enterprise-class deduplication," said Zuspan. "The Diligent system was not easily compatible with our existing storage hardware. It was very complicated to get the software up and running. We spent most of a week working on it. It was also time consuming and complicated to add capacity to the Diligent system. In contrast, the SEPATON S2100-ES2 was out of the box and performing backups in the same afternoon."

Zuspan purchased a SEPATON S2100-ES2 VTL with two SRE nodes and 75 TB of usable capacity. When he had used 94% of his capacity, Zuspan installed DeltaStor deduplication software and reclaimed 40 TB of space, which is now available to support future data growth.  "Adding capacity simply involved adding a disk shelf," explained Zuspan. "Previously, we maintained only one week of full backups online, but using deduplication we now maintain a full six weeks."

Accelerated Performance and Expanded Capacity for All
"Backing up our UNIX production systems with our tape drive system took twelve hours. With the SEPATON VTL, it now takes under seven hours, nearly half the time. Restore times are much faster with the ability to use many more virtual tape drives from which to restore. The VTL administration is hands-off – we never have to touch the appliance as it appears to our backup software as traditional physical tape. Our administrative staff is now free to perform more important tasks — so this is a dream come true for us," said Zuspan.

"Although we initially planned to use the S2100 with DeltaStor to backup just the UNIX and Linux systems, it quickly became the solution of choice for our Windows-based Exchange system as well." Zuspan’s data center counterparts responsible for managing the health organization’s Windows servers needed a more scalable and cost-effective way to backup their rapidly growing data requirements. "Data Domain was brought in a couple of years ago but our capacity demands had long-since outgrown their systems.  After two costly upgrades, we decided to migrate off Data Domain to the SEPATON system. A fully deduplicated Exchange backup set earns ratios of up to 279:1."

"Deduplication technology is at the top of most large enterprises’ IT ‘must-have’ list," said Mike Worhach, president and CEO, SEPATON, Inc. "Deduplication is able to reduce required storage capacity so dramatically since only the unique data is stored that its cost saving proposition is clear. MultiCare wisely invested in deduplication and cut their need to acquire more capacity by forty-percent, freeing up real dollars for other important purchases. Their IT staff is also able to provide higher levels of service without adding head count."