Mississippi Baptist Health Systems Implementing Symantec

Symantec Corp. announced Mississippi Baptist Health Systems (MBHS) uses Symantec storage, backup and archiving software to ensure patient records are both secure and immediately available to doctors and medical professionals. As a result, MBHS complies with regulations governing the storage and accessibility of electronic patient records and has realized more than $4 million in savings.

MBHS operates one of the state’s largest private, general hospitals with nearly 600 patient beds. The 55-person information services department is a centralized operation with one data center that supports the main hospital and eight outlying clinics. This distributed network of patient-care locations hampered the ability of staffers to gain immediate access to archived health records.

"Data was housed in hundreds of siloed servers, which meant 95 percent of our storage space was being wasted, and we did not have redundancy or scalability," says Jimmy Touchstone, senior systems engineer, Mississippi Baptist Health Systems. "At the same time, our archive data volumes grew from 10 terabytes in 2004 to 130 terabytes in 2009, a pace we expect to continue. So we needed a way to simultaneously manage this growth and contain costs, and ensure we meet federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and state regulations requirements governing the retention of sensitive patient data."

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:

• Phase 1 – consolidated hospital data onto an IBM enterprise disk storage system and standardized backup operations on Symantec NetBackup.
• 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 NetBackup and Symantec Enterprise Vault archiving software.
• Phase 3 – improved performance and reduced redundancy in the high-speed IBM server environment with Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability from Symantec. Implemented Veritas Cluster Server to provide failover capabilities during maintenance of the backup server.
• Phase 4 – created a disaster recovery data center that completes the storage management upgrade for MBHS.

Analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group found MBHS has realized more than $4 million in savings through backup labor productivity gains and cost avoidance, storage solution cost avoidance, high-availability hardware cost avoidance, and end-user and IS productivity gains through faster retrieval of backed up and archived data.

"Along with the Symantec software, we’ve also found Symantec Business Critical Services to be extremely valuable to us when troubleshooting any issue in our data center," adds Touchstone. "We’re in the life-saving business, so we must be able to provide our caregivers with access to information at the speed of ‘right now’ because the decisions they make may save a patient’s life."