Since its founding in 1950, Rush Memorial Hospital of Rushville, Indiana has consistently operated as a community partner committed to this city of nearly 6,000, with a significant additional reach into a large rural population of patients. As in any modern hospital with state-of the-art facilities offering enhanced service to patients, Rush Memorial’s IT operations are in a constant state of evolution. They are geared toward greater levels of patient responsiveness while simultaneously carrying out extensive reporting activities, meeting records retention requirements and more.
With patients’ health at stake, the hospital’s production applications must remain accessible. But its existing tape and disk-based backup and recovery system was no longer agile or fast enough to provide the level of protection the hospital sought. As a result, Rush Memorial has replaced it with disk imaging-based software from Acronis.
Tape backups a victim of IT evolution
The hospital runs a number of database hospital applications, including a Windows®-based Healthland™ EMR (electronic medical records) Solutions system with an integrated financial component and Merge Healthcare Radiology software for online access to patient images. The hospital had been using Symantec Backup Exec for five years, according to Jim Boyer, Rush Memorial’s Chief Technology Officer, but the tape and disk-based system fell short of the immediate recovery times the hospital sought.
"A tape solution requires great effort to recover either individual files or an entire system to a specific point in time, and that assumes you have the tape you need on site," Boyer points out. "With Backup Exec, we were bogged down to the point that we began to experiment with different applications that would image the entire system."
For instance, they worked with Microsoft® Volume Shadow Copy Service technology (VSS) image-based backups to take snapshots of the data. But while it was effective, it could not recover the server itself, including its operating system, applications and settings. A well thought-out disk imaging solution offered more promise, according to Boyer. "In a crisis situation, disk imaging allows immediate recovery of full systems or files even from an off-site repository. Taking a server image of the OS and applications is so important because it allows you to restore in many different ways, including to dissimilar hardware and virtual infrastructures."
A better imaging solution
Acronis came to the hospital’s attention about four years ago when purchased Acronis® Snap Deploy® to roll out 260 new PCs throughout the hospital. "Snap Deploy allows us to take an image of a departmental PC and push the image onto new computers," Boyer says. "Based on its imaging performance, I thought that Acronis backup products might work equally well."
The IT team embarked on a 60-day evaluation of the Acronis backup and recovery software and exercised its capabilities extensively. After a successful trial, Rush Memorial Hospital made the transition to Acronis. More recently they upgraded to the latest Acronis product, Acronis®Backup & Recovery™ 10.
Improved Recovery Time Objectives
Over time, the hospital has been able to substantially shrink its recovery time objectives. "Acronis gives us a quicker restore time," Boyer points out. "The hospital has been able to standardize on a recovery time of a half hour for each 50GB of data that needs to be restored."This compares favorably to the many hours, even days of recovery that a tape or standard disk based backup (.bkf) entails. Acronis software is set to automatically take snapshot images of each server every night, using Grandfather/Father/Son backup rotational schemes for about 1.5 terabytes of backup storage.
Simplified upgrades
Besides backups, Boyer says Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 has simplified migrations to newer equipment and software. Boyer is particularly appreciative of Acronis’ ability to upgrade to dissimilar hardware without drama. "Rather than build a new system from scratch, we can image it, recover the image to the new hardware, build the RAID and have a server ready to go in about 20 minutes, with data restoration taking most of that time."
Exploiting other features
Beyond disaster recovery, the hospital has exploited additional Acronis features and functionalities. For instance, it recently began to use Acronis data compression on its SAN server. This is expected to reduce new disk purchases.
In addition, the hospital has used VMWare® to virtualize about 80% of its server population. This in turn has created a small stockpile of older, still serviceable, hardware that the hospital can quickly repurpose into physical hosts for virtual servers whenever they’re needed. As a result, the hospital has effectively eliminated the need for expensive standby duplicate servers.
"We can use Acronis to recover very quickly onto a virtual machine, hosted on whatever platform I have available," he says. "For instance, if I have a failure on a newer Dell™ PowerEdge™1950 server, I can have the Acronis image up and running in minutes, either virtually or on dissimilar hardware. In some cases the dissimilar hardware will run slower, but users can continue to work without interruption until repairs are made and the original machine is back online."
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