Greenville Hospital System Cures HIPAA Flu With Data Protection Solution

Business issues
Greenville Hospital System is a leading health care provider in South Carolina's Upstate Region. Mushrooming data growth and an aging backup infrastructure combined to push backups beyond a 24 hour window. Consequently, not all data was being backed up on a daily basis. This meant that some user file restore requests were unable to be met. More importantly however, failure to consistently backup all its patient data on a daily basis exposed the Hospital to higher risk of failing to comply with HIPAA requirements.

Solutions
The Hospital engaged StorageTek Professional Services to craft an end-to-end solution with technology partner VERITAS. The plan leveraged excess capacity available in an installed PowderHorn 9310 tape library. Capacity-centric T9940B tape drives were installed and the entire backup process was reconfigured to utilize NetBackup by VERITAS.

Financial benefits
The Hospital increased the utilization of its deployed 9310 tape library to boost its return on this asset. At the operational level, the company replaced about 10 different media types in favor of consolidated T9940B media. Cartridge capacity skyrocketed from 40 MBs (DLT) to 200 GBs (T9940B) to achieve a 5,000-fold increase—and reduce the per gigabyte storage cost. Additionally, the labor-hours devoted to managing backups dropped by an estimated 75 percent—from one fulltime equivalent, network engineer, to a 2-hour per day, junior administrator.

Business benefits
StorageTek Professional Services relieved the Hospital's limited IT staff from having to add this project to their already long to-do list. The team delivered a one-stop shop solution, working closely with VERITAS to complete the project. The treatment healed the Hospital's ills—with all backups being completed within a more stringent 6-hour window. Hence the company's backups are now HIPAA-compliant, and user data restoration requests are now consistently met.

Technology benefits
The StorageTek solution slashed backup times by 75 percent from 24 hours to 6. Moreover, the new solution replaced a human intervention process with an automated process. Additionally, the performance of the T9940B tape drive eclipses that of the displaced DLT drives. The DLT devices uncompressed performance included a throughput of 6 MBs/sec and a net capacity of 40 MBs. The T9940B drives are delivering compressed 70 MB/sec (43 percent faster) throughput totaling a net capacity of 200 GBs (5,000 times more hosting capacity).