US Oncology Turns to Sepaton VTLs

SEPATON, Inc., announced that US Oncology, Inc., a U.S. healthcare services network dedicated exclusively to cancer treatment and research, has deployed its enterprise-class virtual tape library (VTL), the S2100-ES2 at its Houston, TX data center to backup and restore its critical patient and business data. SEPATON’s VTL technology is an important part of a longer-term plan to eliminate the use of physical tape and to open a second data center to serve as its disaster recovery site.

Serving more than 10,000 clinicians and administrative customers, US Oncology’s IT shop runs 650+ physical servers, including 100+  blade servers with 400+ virtual servers. To protect data on these servers, US Oncology’s IT staff performed incremental backups nightly using IBM LTO 2 tape drives and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software. The tape drive system did not have the speed or capacity to handle their growing data volumes which reduced overall reliability.

"Patient data is critically important," said Scott Booth, data center manager for US Oncology. "The immediate availability of medical records ensures a better patient experience while allowing our affiliated practices to operate more efficiently."

The Need for a Faster, More Scalable System
"Our LTO 2 tape library was growing out of control with two libraries’ handling 1500 tape slots and 16 tape drives, and still, we needed more capacity," explained Booth. "Our choice was either to move to disk or buy a second tape library." Incremental backups would start nightly at 5:00 pm and at 10:00 am, they were still going – the backup window had all but closed. With more than 3TB of daily data to backup combined with the complexity of running their tape system, meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) became increasingly difficult to achieve. "We knew we needed a VTL to correct our performance and scalability issues," concluded Booth.

The IT team’s top considerations for a new system included performance and scalability gains for both backup and restore processes, with an eye towards the future goal of easily replicating data from one data center site to another serving as a disaster recovery site planned for operations in 2009

The evaluation took US Oncology to several vendors but SEPATON was quickly selected as the VTL provider of choice and a 100TB system with 4Gb infrastructure was purchased. "SEPATON bested the competition on performance and scalability, hands-down," touted Booth. "During the testing phase, our backup administrator was amazed to see that the backups happened so fast, we couldn’t see it.  We dramatically increased the size of the data set and it became barely visible – it’s still very fast!"

The SEPATON system eliminated their need to buy two new tape library systems to scale capacity. They could simply add another disk shelf for more capacity as they need it.

Remarkable Improvements in Backup Speed and Restore Performance
The SEPATON S2100-ES2 has cut US Oncology’s tape migrations from five hours to almost immediately, and improved tape reclamations from eight hours to minutes. The system also makes restoring data nearly instantaneous. "Prior to SEPATON, restoring data was an awful experience," recalled Booth. "Retrieving even a couple of files from different points in time meant mounting and culling through tens to hundreds of tapes. With SEPATON, you simply go to the appropriate point in time.  The system makes restoring data nearly immediate and relieves our IT staff of time-consuming media management tasks and frees them up for more productive assignments."

The Future Looks Bright with Disk to Disk
Looking ahead, US Oncology is considering the addition of the SEPATON Site2 remote replication software. Today, their SEPATON S2100-ES2 backup data is copied to tape and driven to an off-site location. The plan is to archive all of their data using HP RISS archival product and to use Site2 to move backup data to their new offsite DR facility-expected to open in 2009.  Booth is also looking forward to leveraging SEPATON’s DeltaStor data deduplication software to reduce capacity requirements even further and to lower his cost-per-gigabyte investment even more.

"SEPATON was selected to fulfill our vision for a tapeless data protection strategy," stated Booth. "Their compatibility with physical tape systems means we can benefit from a combined disk/tape strategy in the interim, and give us the confidence that we have the systems in place to evolve our strategy overtime."

"Seamlessly scaling performance and scalability independently from a single SEPATON VTL is a capability unmatched in the industry," said Asim Zaheer, vice president of marketing for SEPATON, Inc. "While US Oncology had the foresight to outline a data protection and risk management strategy that may require some changes in their DR procedures, they prudently selected a backup and recovery system that can straddle the realities of where they are today but will not require any policy changes or costly upgrades when they implement their future vision."