Baptist Health System Cures TSM Backups With Sepaton

SEPATON, Inc. announced that Baptist Health System, Inc. (BHS) is using its S2100-ES2 data protection appliance with DeltaStor software for deduplication and 2 TB HDS storage arrays to enhance capacity for the future, reclaim physical drive resources, and lay the groundwork for a tapeless off-site disaster recovery strategy.
 

 
To manage its patient care and business operations for more than 6,000 users, BHS relies on IT systems including PeopleSoft /DB2, Cerner/Oracle RMAN, electronic medical records, Exchange email, various clinical applications, and SQL databases. The servers running these systems generate well over 60 percent of BHS’s total backup data volume. BHS backs up over 4 TB of data from hundreds of servers daily, storing over 165 TB of data, including data waiting for expiration. They manage their data protection with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) backup software.
 
Measurable results with SEPATON
BHS has been relying on SEPATON for its data protection strategy for several years. According to John West, CTO for Baptist Health System, "For our growing volumes, SEPATON performance and scalability continues to remain ahead of competitive offerings. The SEPATON S2100 cut BHS’ off-site copy process by more than 90 percent, reduced our disk pool by over 65 percent, and significantly streamlined our TSM management complexity. Our restores went from hours to minutes and earned us high praise from our user community."  
 
BHS now uses the new SEPATON S2100-ES2 Series 2900 with HDS arrays and DeltaStor deduplication software with 48 TB usable capacity and a single SEPATON Replication Engine (SRE) node to manage data growth exceeding 30 percent annually. The SEPATON data protection appliance is configured with one virtual library and 64 virtual LTO drives. The virtual drives can be accessed by TSM to perform more concurrent jobs at higher speeds to complete TSM workloads faster.
 
Deduplication with denser drives yields more capacity
"The SEPATON 2900 Series came with denser drives than the earlier model. With these drives combined with DeltaStor deduplication, we have enough capacity to support our data growth for approximately three more years," explained Chip Bell, network engineer for Baptist Health System. "Dedupe ratios vary based on data types but it’s fair to say our space savings with DeltaStor have been dramatic. We anticipate that the added density will save us thousands of dollars annually as we now have the capacity to pull all data off our existing physical LTO4 drives and backup entirely to one easy-to-manage SEPATON data protection appliance."
 
BHS has achieved control over its backup window with the additional capacity in its new system. If TSM housekeeping tasks, such as storage pool backups, migrations, reclamations, are taking too long to complete, BHS can manually shrink the time allotted for the backup window to give these administrative tasks more time to finish. The SEPATON appliance completes daily TSM processes including the primary pool backup to off-site copy, and reclamations faster, more reliably, and often more frequently. "SEPATON’s management console gives me a clear picture of the deduplication process and resulting ratios, and allows me to adjust dedupe algorithms by data type for even tighter control," said Bell.
 
"The SEPATON appliance combined with world-class, high availability HDS storage gives us a high degree of confidence in SEPATON as our data protection partner," said West. "The next phase of our plan is to purchase a second SEPATON appliance for an offsite location to replicate the primary data center for DR, eliminating physical tape entirely."
 
"Baptist Health System recognizes the performance, reliability and cost advantages of deploying intelligent data protection with grid scalability, as well as advanced reporting and management," said Mike Thompson, executive vice president of sales and marketing, SEPATON, Inc. "BHS is a sophisticated and advanced organization with backup and recovery challenges which include explosive growth and high regulatory requirements. We are gratified to be working with this quality organization and proud that they’ve selected SEPATON for their future demands."