University Medical Center With Idera

At Microsoft TechEd, Idera, provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration solutions and division of BBS Technologies, Inc., announced that Idera SQL safe customer University Medical Center (UMC) has reduced SQL Server backup times and the amount of space required for backups resulting in significant storage and cost savings.

Ranked among the nation’s premier hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, UMC employs 4,000 people who support more than 20,000 admissions and 400,000 out-patient visits annually. With 122 SQL Server instances, UMC Database Administrator Tom Ryan needed a high-performance backup and recovery solution that would meet UMC’s rapid growth while reducing SQL server backup and recovery times and the amount of storage space required.

Ryan chose Idera SQL safe based on the flexibility and affordability of licensing based on SQL Server instances, ease of use and the central enterprise console for real-time management and monitoring.

"It’s really easy to use. With the SQL safe console, I can look at all my instances and see very quickly if there are any problems," Ryan said.

After a server administrator mistakenly thought a backup had failed to complete because the backup size had been reduced by nearly three quarters, Ryan knew SQL safe was also saving a substantial amount of storage space. In fact, the size of the two most recent backups of Critical Care data, UMC’s largest SQL database, was reduced from a terabyte to about 275 gigabytes. Ryan was able to delay purchasing additional off-site storage resulting in immediate cost savings.

"We can back up a half-terabyte database in half an hour with 68 percent compression," Ryan said. Also, because of SQL safe’s network resiliency, "since adding SQL safe, UMC has not experienced any backup failures from network outages, even for the database that is backed up in a central location."