Veeam Deployed by Spanish Hospital Parc Sanitari Virgili

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili, one of Spain’s largest hospitals, has deployed Veeam to support of the management of 6TB of data across different locations, in order to guarantee availability of patient care services and reduce data management costs.

Veeam ensures continuity of health services with the ability to restore the hospital’s IT environment, which is 95% virtualized, in less than 10 minutes. In addition, the company has made full system backups 80% faster and enabled greater security of backups with on-site and cloud replication, in turn saving on-site storage costs and helping to achieve compliance with key requirements of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili is a public company created 18 years ago, belonging to the Catalan Health Service (CatSalut) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain. Located in the heart of Barcelona, with a total of 363 beds, the company’s main objective is to deliver healthcare services and social care to the citizens.

“With Veeam we can guarantee Always-On Availability of our services,” said Jordi Cuadrado, head of systems, Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili. “When a server goes down, it can mean that a patient might not have a prescription supplied for their medication or that a doctor cannot view a document from another department or an x-ray. Veeam helps us provide high reliability of backup copies and a quick and easy restoration process. Plus, the day-to-day management of backups, replicas, and recoveries is easier for our team to manage. With Veeam there is a great difference; it’s like going from the analog to the digital age.“

For Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili, the top priority is to minimize, if not eliminate entirely, the downtime of IT systems that host patient services, and avoid losses of critical data. Meeting these objectives for infrastructure that was 95% virtualized with vSphere demanded a backup and DR platform that could provide availability for all virtual, physical and cloud workloads.

The requirement here was to ensure the reliability of the backup copies and their quality, while managing the restoration of files or VMs with the greatest ease possible, should the worst ever happen.

Veeam’s technology partner, Logicalis Group Ltd, was instrumental in selecting Veeam Backup Essentials as a native product for virtualized environments that matches the features of VMware, which minimized deployment times and eased the deployment into the production environment. Backup Essentials ensures availability across all workloads (including vSphere and Hyper-V) from a single management console.

The hospital’s primary datacenter has two hosts (Supermicro SuperServer) that support 72 VMs. This infrastructure combines BBDD in SQL and MySQL, and covers three critical applications: the Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP, the Denarios and Argos HR software, a platform shared with other SAP-based CatSalut hospitals, whose server is in third-party facilities but whose communications are the responsibility of the IT team.

“The HA of the three solutions is crucial,” said Cuadrado. “We need to ensure fast and agile access to information to the nearly 500 people who work in the hospital. Veeam has provided something we did not have previously; intelligent data management. The backups were slow and complex and we discovered corrupt files – we didn’t know if the backups were of a good quality to restore from. When renewing the storage with a NetApp Hybrid Flash cabin, we decided to improve not only the backup of data but also to incorporate VM replication capabilities to guarantee the maximum availability of services.“