University of Utah Health Care Implements Sepaton S2100

Sepaton, Inc. announced that University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) deployed its S2100 data protection platform, replacing an incumbent deduplication solution, enabling them to meet backup windows, simplify the tape staging process for long-term storage, and store more data in less disk space through improved deduplication ratios.

UUHC is an health care system affiliated with the University of Utah. UUHC data center backups approximately 15TB/day and 1.7-2.0PB per month. They manage and protect a total of 7PB of data from both the University and healthcare organizations by backing up data, then staging it and copying it to tape for long-term storage to comply with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). 

“We had a non-scalable deduplication system, but we outgrew it in 4 months. Since our data volumes are growing at approximately 20% annually, we needed a system that could scale out to meet our needs. We were always moving data off the disk to reclaim capacity,” said Rung Chuon, systems administrator, UUHSC. “It was a management nightmare.“

Performance also suffered as its inline deduplication slowed the backup process as data volumes grew. “We conduct the most difficult proof-of-concepts (POCs) possible,” said Daniel Thor, systems administrator, UUHSC.

UUHSC not only treated the POC systems like they were in full production, they pushed them hard to find their limits. The S2100-ES3 gateway met their POC challenges with ease.

“The POC we did on the Sepaton system was the smoothest we have ever conducted,” noted Thor. “We were also impressed with the level of service Sepaton provided throughout the process.” 

Surpassing Expectations
The Sepaton system was installed and running quickly using NetBackup OST over FC. The backup performance has exceeded expectations.

“You can throw as much data at it as you want and it just handles it,” said Thor. “Before Sepaton, we fought to meet our backup windows. With Sepaton, we meet our windows and everything is clean. Restore times are also faster.“

Before Sepaton, they could only use four streams to backup 13-15TB of storage for one of their key Oracle databases. With Sepaton, they can use 10 streams and complete the backups 50% faster than before.

The S2100 made the UUHSC tape staging process less time consuming and more efficient.

“With our old systems, the staging/clean-up process would hold us up. With the Sepaton technology, ingest is always fast and all cleanup is done in the background,” said Chuon.

“Because the Sepaton system knows the backup and data type, it is much more efficient at reclaiming scratch tapes and unused capacity,” said Thor. “The result is, the system runs seamlessly and our pagers don’t go off in the middle of the night anymore.“

S2100 also provided better deduplication ratios than the previous system. They are getting up to 3:1 capacity reclamation on their largest Oracle database and as much as 5.7:1 overall.

“We are storing far more data in less physical space,” said Chuon.

The Sepaton system will enable them to add processing nodes and capacity as their data volumes grow.

“Because of deduplication and compression, we are currently only using 89TB of the 212TB of raw capacity currently allocated in our Sepaton system,” said Chuon.

“UUHC decided to conduct a thorough evaluation, including a proof-of-concept test on leading disk-based data protection systems competitors, so we knew they were serious about getting it right. This is exactly the opportunity we relish to demonstrate that Sepaton’s performance, scalability, deduplication and reliability is second to none,” said Tim Butchart, SVP, WW sales, Sepaton.