Rush Memorial Hospital Protects Medical Records with Acronis Software

Acronis provides community hospital with faster deployments, shorter RTOs, and simplified migrations.

Rush Memorial Hospital of Rushville, Indiana has operated as a community partner since 1950. As in any state-of-the-art hospital, Rush Memorial’s IT operations are in a constant state of evolution. This evolution allows for greater levels of patient responsiveness while carrying out extensive reporting activities, meeting records retention requirements, and more.

With patients’ health at stake, the hospital’s production applications must remain accessible. Unfortunately, its existing tape and disk-based backup and recovery system was no longer agile enough to provide the level of protection the hospital sought. As a result, Rush Memorial replaced it with Acronis Cyber Protect.

Rush Memorial runs a number of hospital database applications, including a Windows-based Healthland EMR (electronic medical records) Solutions system and Merge Healthcare Radiology software for online access to patient images. The hospital had been using Symantec Backup Exec prior to Acronis, but it fell short of the immediate RTOs they require, according to Jim Boyer, Rush Memorial’s Chief Technology Officer.

“A tape solution requires great effort to recover either individual files or an entire system to a specific point in time. That’s assuming you have the tape you need on-site,” Boyer adds. “That’s why we began to experiment with full-image solutions.”

Health care

Initially, they worked with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) image-based backups to take snapshots of the data. While it was effective, it couldn’t recover the server itself, including its operating system, applications and settings. A better disk imaging solution was needed. “In a crisis situation, disk imaging allows immediate recovery of full systems – even from an off-site repository. Taking a server image of the OS and applications is crucial because it allows you to restore in many different ways, including to dissimilar hardware and virtual infrastructures.”

Acronis came to the hospital’s attention when it purchased Acronis Snap Deploy to roll out 260 new PCs throughout the hospital. “Acronis Snap Deploy allowed us to take an image of a departmental PC and push it onto new computers,” Boyer says. “Based on this imaging performance, I thought Acronis would be a perfect fit.” The IT team began a 60-day evaluation and then decided to transition to Acronis Cyber Protect.

Since the transition, the hospital has substantially shrunk its recovery time objectives, Boyer says. “The hospital has been able to achieve an average of 30 minutes to recover 50 GB of data.” Compare that to the many hours or even days that a tape or disk-based backup demanded.

Besides backups, Boyer says, Acronis Cyber Protect has simplified migrations to newer, dissimilar equipment and software. “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 20 minutes.”

In addition, the hospital has recently started to use Acronis data compression on its SAN server, a step that’s expected to reduce new disk purchases.

Additionally, the hospital uses VMware to virtualize about 80% of its server population – creating a stockpile of older, still serviceable hardware that can be repurposed into physical hosts for virtual servers. As a result, the hospital has effectively eliminated the need for expensive standby duplicate servers. “We use Acronis to recover quickly onto a virtual machine, hosted on whatever platform is available,” he says.