EVault Chosen by Aspen Healthcare

i365, Inc., A Seagate Company, announced that Aspen
Healthcare, a private health care provider operating four medical facilities
throughout the UK,
has replaced its tape-based backup solution with EVault Plug-n-Protect backup
and recovery appliances.

For Aspen’s
IT department, which manages a wide area network involving 35 servers and
hundreds of user accounts, it’s not only a strategic imperative to be
especially diligent with its vital patient data, it’s the law. The UK’s Data Protection Act (of 1998) set in-place
requirements for Aspen
to establish appropriate processes, which address the unique and sensitive
nature of their patients’ personal data and ensure confidentiality.

"Backing up to
tape has always been reliable but was also a worry. The process is slow and,
with multiple tapes and multiple servers, logistically complex. We were backing
up at least once a day, but needed to move to multiple backups. In addition,
like all organisations we are always improving to mitigate against a disaster,"
said David Williams, IT director at Aspen.

Aspen’s
IT team oversaw an evaluation of several backup solutions, including i365’s
EVault line of disk-based data protection products. In the end they were won
over by the simplicity of EVault. Most notably that the solution could back up
a single server at any time, and compress the data by more than 85 percent. A
typical Aspen SQL database went from a native size of 47GB to 5.6GB, a
footprint just 12 percent of the original. This combination of performance
advantages led Aspen to upgrade to a pair of
EVault Plug-n-Protect appliances for its Wimbledon office and head office in
central London.

The solution was sold through Cristie Data, an i365
reseller, which recommended EVault after visiting Aspen to learn more about its data protection
needs. "We won’t sell or support
anything we don’t believe in 100 percent. So we test new products from a
technical and a commercial point of view. We do our best to break them. The
EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance passed every test," said Steve
Blakemore, product & marketing manager at Cristie.

EVault has simplified Aspen’s
management processes for data backups. The company now has a limited
management requirement regarding backup tapes, and can check backups for all
servers in a single solution. Further, the IT team can monitor everything from
the EVault Central Control management console.

Williams continued: "We now capture our critical data in three-hour windows or snapshots.
EVault could capture backups once an hour if necessary, but three hours is
sensible given our bandwidth. Previously we could only back up our SQL
databases that frequently."

In Cristie, Williams and his team found an IT partner for
the future: "From delivery to
deployment, including training and configuration, in less than a week, Cristie
worked hard to find us the best solution, and i365 worked with us to set it up
for our environment. It’s been smooth sailing ever since."