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Novant Health is a not-for-profit, integrated healthcare system in western North Carolina that employs 22,000 people and serves more than 3.5 million people in 34 counties. The company provides excellence in healthcare with nine hospitals, two nursing home and senior residential facilities, physician practices, outpatient surgery centers, rehabilitation and community health outreach programs. As a large healthcare provider, Novant must manage and protect tremendous amounts of critical and sensitive information, ranging from patient records to the system data that runs emergency departments. To accomplish this, it was important to have highly reliable backup and recovery technologies in place based on continuous data protection (CDP).

The Challenge: Unsuccessful Backups of Large Data Volumes
Novant Health has multiple data centers within its infrastructure, which include UNIX, Windows and Mainframe servers; storage area networks (SAN) and local disk storage. The company utilizes healthcare-specific software applications such as QS/1, a retail pharmacy management system that processes new prescriptions and claims, fills refills and manages inventory. With such a large amount of patient data to manage, Novant was experiencing problems with the reliability of its backups.

"We were just doing simple copies of our data using both disk and tape-based backup methods, but because the volume of data was so large, it was causing problems with our system and we weren't getting successful backups," said Tamara Anthony, LAN Administrator for Novant Health. "Within our QS/1 system, which runs retail pharmacies, files were failing or becoming corrupted. And data loss is something we just can't afford to have happen."