White River Health System

Page 2
Case study
White River
Health System
Industry
Healthcare
“We go home and sleep better at night knowing that we’ll go in to a
successful Data Protector backup the next morning. We were spending
way too much time on backups before. Now, we get an email once a day,
look at it and know things are running smoothly. That’s how backup
should be.”
— Danny Kelley, director of Information Systems, White River Health System
“We were using Acronis Backup and
Recovery,” says Matt Stone, network
administrator. “It worked well on a few
servers, but once we began scheduling
nightly backups on about 25 servers, we
found that we couldn’t rely on it. Every night
there were problems with some servers not
being backed up, so every morning we had to
check backup logs, track down which servers
the software had missed and try to find out
what went wrong. We never felt that we had
an enterprise backup solution we could
count on, yet we knew how important it
is to have one.”
White River backs up about 1TB of data and
applications each night; physician practice
EMRs (a data repository of medical record
archives), Microsoft® Exchange servers, its
point of sale application, sleep studies and
EEGs, along with the domain controllers and
file servers on which its network depends.
The normally simple process of managing
backup meant spending time on the phone
with technical support, uninstalling the
software, running a clean-up tool, reinstalling
the software, then wondering whether
it would work correctly. Troubleshooting
backups also distracted the team from the
normal IT tasks its members would rather
have focused on, so the team made it a
priority to find and implement a permanently
satisfactory backup solution.
Solution
Switching to Hewlett Packard Enterprise
in less than one month
Since the hardware upgrade, Kelley had
been talking to Hewlett Packard Enterprise
(HPE) about HPE Data Protector, its HPE
backup and recovery software product for the
enterprise. HPE pointed him to Alphaworks, a
certified HPE Gold Partner, to meet with his
team and demonstrate the product.
Because of concerns about compliance and
business continuity, most organizations are
hesitant to install new backup software, so it’s
necessary to proceed carefully in this remove-
and-replace engagement. The pre-sales team
at HPE went through the proof-of-concept
phase emphasizing the features that White
River wanted in Data Protector, including
granular restoration of individual messages
and entire email boxes on Microsoft Exchange
servers, as well as individual files on virtual
machines. Alphaworks assisted with the sizing
of the HPE 3PAR V400 and with connecting
HPE Data Protector to StoreOnce.
In estimating its backup requirements,
Kelley’s team thought it had ample capacity
already on site, but they came up short. HPE
and Alphaworks saw this and were able to
bring in an HPE ProLiant DL380p Gen8
server to avoid any delay in implementation.
Finally, Alphaworks trained Kelley’s team and
then helped with setup and installation on
the servers.