Boston Medical Center Deploys Data Domain and EMC

Data Domain, Inc. announced that Boston Medical Center has purchased Data Domain systems to cost-effectively protect its Microsoft Exchange email archive assets and meet state and federal regulatory objectives. The hospital’s ITS department chose to implement Data Domain DD690 systems over EMC Centera based on the Data Domain solution’s easy integration with Mimosa’s NearPoint content archiving solution, its efficient storage reduction capabilities and Boston Medical Center’s positive experience with Data Domain as an enterprise-class backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution.

The primary teaching affiliate for Boston University School of Medicine, Boston Medical Center is the largest Level 1 trauma center in New England with 626-licensed beds. The hospital’s mission is to provide ‘Exceptional Care Without Exception.’ Boston Medical Center excels in providing consistently accessible health services to its patients. The ITS infrastructure and systems that support these services play an important role in ensuring that hospital staff can work as effectively and efficiently as possible without worrying about the systems. It is essential that data is fully protected and recoverable to meet internal SLAs, state, federal and HIPAA regulatory requirements.

The ITS department is responsible for two large data centers – an offsite location serves as its primary data center while the hospital itself serves as a co-location and DR site. ITS manages more than 400 TB of medical, clinical, email, database, HR and finance data across more than 100 applications, and data growth continues at 40-50 percent per year. According to Brad Blake, director of IT for Boston Medical Center, before the organization could tackle its next generation archive requirements, it first needed to standardize procedures and maximize cost-efficiencies for backup, shorten its recovery time objectives and reduce DR administration.

"As a non-profit, our goal is to always maintain or lower operating costs. Yet relying on our existing disk library and tape storage infrastructure was not cost-effective, it couldn’t keep pace and we were grappling with support issues across multiple vendors," explained Blake. "We were spending upwards of $70,000 a year on tape media and administration. With support contract renewals also looming, I realized that adding onto this existing infrastructure was not moving us forward strategically."

An ROI analysis demonstrated that Boston Medical Center could recoup the cost of their initial Data Domain purchase within three years, and that they would save between $300K and $430K compared to a swap-out of their existing disk libraries. An important server virtualization initiative provided the back-drop for the ITS department to purchase two Data Domain DD690 systems, each with six ES20 expansion shelves, in late 2007. Currently, these Data Domain systems are storing the equivalent of more than 350 TB of backups on 3.5 TB of disk, achieving a 99-percent compression rate. The ITS team is also cross-replicating between each data center, which provides efficient and reliable DR.

Secure in the value of Data Domain as a backup solution, the hospital has done away with unreliable tape and expensive conventional disk. Blake and the ITS department began the search for a new storage platform to manage its Microsoft Exchange archive. The choices were quickly narrowed to Data Domain and EMC Centera.

With the Mimosa NearPoint solution chosen to manage the archives, the storage system needed to integrate seamlessly into this environment as well as provide ongoing value to the organization. Based on the positive validation of Data Domain deduplication storage already in production, and its demonstrated ability to work with the NearPoint solution, Boston Medical Center purchased two additional DD690 systems along with optional 10 GbE NICs to allow efficient data movement, fast recoveries and minimize disk resources utilized for compliant archive.

"Boston Medical Center’s ITS organization is meeting its business objectives with Data Domain and we’re pleased to expand on this positive relationship," said Beth White, vice president of marketing for Data Domain. "As Data Domain broadens its technology to solve enterprise storage issues beyond backup and DR, we are very excited to work with leading organizations like Boston Medical Center."

"Thus far, our three-year Data Domain ROI model has proved itself out in large part due to the reductions in operating and administration costs we’ve already experienced. Data Domain has streamlined our backup, DR and now our archive processes. We’re seeing massive data compression results and we’ve minimized our data center footprint and power/cooling costs. Most importantly, my team and I are able to work much more efficiently and effectively managing our data storage needs," concluded Blake.