Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw, Poland, Customer of Nakivo Backup & Replication

Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their environment.

Formerly St. Stnislaw Hospital), it is the oldest medical institution for infectious diseases. It was established by the decree of Tsar Nicholas in 1881, to combat dangerous epidemics. Currently, the hospital is the leading health care center in the field of infectious diseases in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe.

The hospital performs tasks on 3 levels: providing patients with medical services, infectious diseases prevention and medical staff training.

The hospital’s IT infrastructure consists of 1 site and 6 physical servers, where 3 of servers are virtualized on vSphere and 2 on Hyper-V. In total, the hospital has 20 VMs that store a web server, an applications server, a hospital information system, an enterprise resource planning system, a Microsoft Active Directory server, a picture archiving and communication system and an Oracle database.

All data stored at the hospital is critical. Patient data, including medical history, is updated every few minutes. In the event of an emergency, it is vital to recover the most recent drug administration history in order to avoid overdosing or incompatibility of drugs. When IT systems are not available, the hospital cannot take new patients, plan treatments or dose drugs. This is why a reliable VM backup solution is critical to support the hospital’s daily operations.

Previously, the hospital only backed up its Oracle database. If, for example, an applications server crashed, the IT team had to install a new one and configure it from scratch. Basically, the hospital could not backup an entire VM. The backup of the Oracle database itself required a significant amount of time, and recovery was even more time-consuming. After virtualizing 2 of its servers on Hyper-V, Backup & Replication was recommended to the hospital of by a solution partner.

Backup & Replication is designed for virtualized environments and supports both vSphere and Hyper-V. The hospital ensures that all its VMs are available around the clock in order to provide optimal patient care. Moreover, the simplicity of the software allows the IT team to save amount of time on administration.

“Backup & Replication is a simple and an intuitive solution. The dashboard offers great visibility, as all alarms are visible immediately after logging in, and the web interface allows you to use the product anywhere, without the need of installing a client. That is handy when you use an Apple MacBook,” says Krzysztof Plochocki, IT manager, Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw.

The Nakivo solution offers image-based backups, ensuring that data in applications remains consistent and ready for recovery. In addition, the solution provides incremental backups, where only changes are copied to the backup repository, resulting in faster backups. Moreover, with instant VM recovery, entire VMs can be recovered within minutes.

“An initial full backup of our entire infrastructure takes 3 to 4 hours. With incremental backup and because our environment is based on SSDs, the backup jobs complete in a few minutes. We enjoy that we can schedule and structure our backup jobs to ensure the shortest backup windows possible. For example, we backup our accounting server incrementally every day, and, once a week, we do a full backup. While with our hospital information system, we need incremental backups every 8 hours and a full backup every day,” explains Plochocki.

With Nakivo, the hospital set up automated backups to cloud, making the whole backup process automatic. It has integration with the encrypted cloud storage UseCrypt Safe, and all the backups are automatically sent to the cloud.

“Nakivo Backup & Replication allows us to choose UseCrypt Safe as cloud backup storage. In Poland, it is the only encrypted cloud service that is recommended by the Polish government,” says Plochocki.

With Nakivo, the hospital protects its critical data and applications. With a reliable data protection solution from Nakivo, it ensures optimal patient care by making all IT systems always available. The solution allows the hospital to perform full and incremental backups and to send backups automatically to the cloud. With instant VM recovery, the hospital can recover entire VMs instantaneously.

“Previously, we could not backup an entire VM. Recovery of a database from a backup was time-consuming, and the failure of the application server required a new installation. Currently, with just one click, we can recover an entire VM back to any day or time. With Backup & Replication, we save a tremendous amount of time on administration and increase overall reliability as well,” says Plochocki.