A growing healthcare organization in need of improved data management infrastructure

Comprised of an extensive healthcare network spanning multiple hospitals, urgent care facilities, and close to a million emergency room visits, one of the leading healthcare providers in Texas decided it was time to address its data challenge. It was having trouble efficiently managing the growing volume of patient data it was generating to support care of its patients. The organization’s IT Team was managing about 1.5 petabytes of unstructured files and more than 500 million patient records and associated medical images, which needed to be protected and accessible to physicians and nurses across the network.

Not only was patient data growing at a significant rate, their data management requirements were about to become more pronounced as the organization had decided to implement the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system to support the world-class care provided by its caregivers. Given these two considerations, the IT Team began to question whether its existing technology infrastructure could provide the kind of resilient backup and recovery capabilities required for its critical patient data. Data silos across multiple systems and servers lacking a common interface presented a number of challenges. With seven different servers running backups – each with its own storage and management portal – managing data consistently across the organization was time-consuming, and there was increasing concern as to whether data could be restored quickly in the event of an incident. And with a nightly change rate of 20 to 30 terabytes across hundreds of virtual machines and SQL databases, managing the volume and growth rate of data efficiently was daunting with the existing IBM Spectrum Protect solution.

A major contributor to the data growth was in the area of medical imaging. The organization’s practitioners relied on increasingly higher-resolution diagnostic images – good news for the patient and the physician, but a significant contributor to data growth and growing storage costs for the IT team. In addition, the team was plagued by slow performance and an increasing number of missed SLAs.

In addition to managing and protecting business and patient data, the IT team is also charged with protecting the data used and created by the organization’s expansive clinical research initiatives in areas such as precision medicine, cancer treatment, and organ transplantation. With the scope of this data-intensive reach constantly growing, the team had to ensure that they were putting in place infrastructure and data management that could support the organization’s long-term research goals.

Ultimately, the organization needed an agile data protection and management solution that would provide a number of capabilities: provide a holistic view across its large and critical data workloads, improve throughput speeds, deliver speedy restore options in adherence with the kinds of stringent data availability requirements critical to informed healthcare delivery, and manage data growth from patient records and other critical business data.

Commvault and INFINIDAT: A powerful combination

With an expensive IBM maintenance renewal and a pending hardware refresh coming up, the team took the opportunity to evaluate options for a new backup and recovery solution. Relying on input from other companies and the latest Gartner research, the team quickly agreed that the Commvault Data Platform met their requirements for a solution, which could streamline backup and recovery operations as well as provide data insights to enable efficient management of information across the enterprise. Commvault’s ability to integrate both to the hospital’s choice for scalable, high-performance storage from INFINIDAT and its new Epic electronic health records platform were equally important factors. “Commvault was our only choice. The seamless integration between Commvault and our high-performance INFINIDAT storage made the decision even easier,” said the organization’s network and communications architect. INFINIDAT storage provided the level of density, reliability and room for growth that would enable consolidation of multiple storage silos and standardization of its backups on Commvault software.

The team liked the variety of backup and recovery options and capabilities the Commvault solution offers, including the ability to backup virtual systems to the public cloud for disaster recovery, and robust protection for Microsoft OneDrive which was becoming popular with their organization’s IT executives. But validating software performance was critical. “We needed to know exactly how much data Commvault could handle,” said the architect. “We needed to be sure the solution could handle backup speeds of 1 terabyte per hour.” After a first pass of a full backup with Commvault load-balancing between two INFINIDAT InfiniBox units, Commvault deduplication with change block tracking quickly reduced data volumes.

Today, the organization is able to run six streaming backups while achieving rates as high as 32 terabytes an hour across all streams. This speed allows for complete data backups within hours rather than days, ensuring protection for all systems.

Enhanced data resiliency was also a key requirement. Leveraging the combined Commvault/INFINDAT solution architected for speed of backup and recovery, short-retention data is protected with space-efficient snapshots. When combined with INFINIDAT’s “faster than all flash” architecture utilizing advanced AI to learn the relationship between data, the solution gives the organization the ability to restore a large number of virtual machines with near-zero response times while optimizing storage utilization on the InfiniBox units. Commvault’s software-based deduplication provides a second avenue for restoring longer-retention data from an auxiliary copy at a 70 percent faster pace than the organization’s prior solution. And a tiered approach to RTO increases efficient use of IT resources while increasing agility and data reliability.

Future-proofing data growth and protection

Since integrating the Commvault Data Platform to INFINIDAT’s storage solution, the feedback from end-users has been … not much. “When you’re in IT, and you don’t hear anything, it’s good,” says the same architect. “When things are working right, and the data is protected – everyone is happy. Commvault and INFINIDAT gave us a seamless integration that caused minimal disruption to our day to day. Quite honestly, our end users aren’t really aware of the amazing data protection solution we have in place now — and that’s OK with me.”

By moving its data to disk-based systems, and by leveraging Commvault IntelliSnap to keep a week’s-worth of snapshots on hand on INFINIDAT storage for rapid restores coupled with the use of mirroring technologies to harbor copies off site, the organization has multiple recovery options to ensure information is protected and accessible. Further, the team was easily able to configure Commvault’s solution for ransomware from the documentation for mitigation of risk of another kind. “I like to see that Commvault is on the lookout for new potential threats and building resources into its platform to protect against them,” said the architect. “Our security team can now tell our auditors we are utilizing the latest features to safeguard our data and mitigate downtime resulting from malware.”

A few months following the implementation, the organization reported it feels confident that it can protect its data from any disaster it may face — be it as a result of a natural disaster, infrastructure failure, or cyberattack. “We’re seven days a week, 24 hours a day, all-year round. You never know what’s going to happen,” said the architect. “We built a lot of redundancy and reliability into our infrastructure so our data is available and our practitioners have access to what they need to do their work.”