Ochsner Health System Transforms Its Backup and Recovery with EMC

HOPKINTON, Mass., Sept. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced that Ochsner Health System, southeast Louisiana's largest non-profit healthcare delivery system, has implemented a comprehensive, high-performance EMC^® backup and recovery infrastructure to protect its entire IT environment.  With eight hospitals, thirty eight health centers and over 12,000 employees, Ochsner's diverse and rapidly growing IT requirements were straining its legacy backup systems, and it was becoming difficult for the organization to meet its backup windows and keep pace with its SLAs.  

The new EMC backup and recovery solution—which includes EMC Avamar^®, Data Domain^®, NetWorker^®, Data Protection Advisor and Disk Library for mainframe—has dramatically improved Ochsner's backup performance and staff productivity, while better positioning the organization to pursue its private cloud strategy.   Ochsner also deployed EMC VMAX^® and EMC VPLEX^® for its enterprise storage infrastructure solution to enhance application performance and provide high availability for mission-critical applications.

Customer Benefits:

• Better Backup and Recovery Performance— In spite of exponential data growth, Ochsner completes all its backups well within backup windows.  This includes multiple use cases and data types across both its open system and mainframe environments. In addition, the integrated NetWorker and Data Domain solution has enabled Ochsner to meet the SLA requirement of being able to restore a six-terabyte Epic Cache database in less than six hours.
• Operational Efficiency—With EMC's high level of backup automation and the elimination of tape, Ochsner is saving countless man hours, and their entire backup infrastructure is now managed by approximately 75% of a single staff member's time.  Data Protection Advisor enables unified monitoring and management of the entire Ochsner backup infrastructure.
• Reduced Backup Capacity and Network Requirements—With EMC deduplication technologies, network bandwidth for backup data has been reduced by 99%, and backup storage capacity requirements have been dramatically reduced--by a factor of 50x on Avamar virtual backups, and up to 38x on virtualized Epic and Oracle databases via Ochsner's integrated NetWorker and Data Domain solution.
• Elimination of Tape Infrastructure and Costs— Ochsner Health System has eliminated over 2,300 tapes and decommissioned a large tape library, saving on media, handling costs and reducing its backup footprint.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Ochsner has seen dramatic growth in recent years, creating a surge in demand for IT services and a huge expansion of its infrastructure, which was affecting application performance, extending data backup windows, and straining IT staffing resources.  Ochsner needed to upgrade both its backup and recovery systems as well as its ageing storage infrastructure, and turned to EMC.

Ochsner Health System replaced its IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and tape backup system with a comprehensive, integrated EMC backup and recovery solution to provide efficient protection of its virtualized and physical infrastructures and achieve a completely tapeless environment. More than 800 virtual machines and 200 applications at Ochsner, such as Epic EMR, virtualized Oracle databases, Citrix, and more are now protected with its EMC backup and recovery solution.  For a detailed overview of the EMC backup solution, please view the Ochsner Health System backup and recovery profile.

To deliver improved application performance and reliability while enabling more efficient patient care, Ochsner selected EMC VMAX and EMC VPLEX for its Epic EMR infrastructure.  

Customer Quotes:

Doug Lauterbach, Assistant Vice President, Technology, Ochsner

"With EMC Avamar, we have seen a quantum improvement in how quickly we can restore our VMs. Avamar's protection of both our virtual and physical servers is absolutely accelerating our virtualization and private cloud strategy."

"With the intelligence and automation of EMC's comprehensive backup and recovery infrastructure, we've saved countless hours of administrative time while eliminating significant costs associated with off-site tape storage and tapes. Even as our environment has grown dramatically, we're still able to manage all of our backup operations with approximately 75% of a single administrator's time. We can focus more on delivering new applications and services that improve healthcare, rather than simply managing technology. The fluidity and integration across the Avamar and Data Domain products have allowed us to satisfy some very complex backup requirements within a cohesive framework."

Willy Schley, Technology Director, Ochsner

"Since deploying Avamar, we've more than doubled the volume of our backup data and still stay within our ten-hour backup window."

"With a 60:1 deduplication ratio on Avamar data, we've reduced our network bandwidth and storage requirements by 99.2%. So on a daily average basis, 31.2 terabytes of data is written to only 230 gigabytes of physical space. Not only do these efficiency gains improve performance but they preserve our infrastructure and reduce our expenditures."

"Data Domain has enabled some significant data deduplication ratios including a 38:1 for Epic.  In addition, we have reduced our Oracle backup data by 90.3%. We're maintaining our backup windows for Epic and Oracle despite their dramatic growth."

"Epic requires us to restore the Epic database from a backup in under six hours. With our Cache database sized at six terabytes, it's not easy to find a solution to do that. Data Domain Boost and NetWorker turned out to be the perfect combination."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about Avamar, Data Domain, Disk Library for mainframe, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor, VMAX and VPLEX
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN  

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Avamar, Data Domain, NetWorker, VMAX and VPLEX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation