Royal Cornwall Hospitals Prescribe CommVault Simpana

Royal
Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trusts (RCHT), comprising three hospitals in the
United Kingdom, has deployed CommVault
Simpana 9 software to safeguard and manage the growth in
medical and patient data, and has reported cutting overall data management
administration time by 40 percent.

Averaging 600,000 patient visits each year as the principal
provider of acute care services in the UK’s county of Cornwall, RCHT strives to
stay at the forefront of medical advances to ensure the delivery of superior
healthcare services. A major part of ensuring the highest levels of patient
care is protecting and retaining 40 TBs of different types of medical files and
images which are stored in a highly virtualised VMware vSphere ESX environment,
encompassing mirrored data centres and 33 remote backup sites. At the heart of
the solution is Simpana 9’s approach to archiving, indexing,
and storing data centrally.

According to RCHT, Simpana 9 now enables the IT team
to automatically move older data from expensive primary to low-cost
secondary storage while accommodating a wide range of retention requirements.
Using Simpana software’s embedded deduplication, RCHT has also reduced overall
network traffic and shortened backup and restore times to drive increased
operational efficiencies and cost savings.

Thanks to Simpana
software’s integrated SRM
capability, a 360-degree view of both physical and virtual environments ensures
the volume of data on critical application servers are reduced, by removing inactive data that would not need to be immediately recoverable in
a disaster.

Additionally, Simpana software’s enterprise search and
content classification capabilities allows for rapid discovery and retrieval to
support compliance audits and strict medical retention requirements.

With Simpana software’s SRM module, increased visibility
into RCHT’s environment offers the IT team analysis and
tracking of storage trends to meet evolving data management demands.

According to RCHT, centralising data protection has reduced
administration to less than five hours each week. Previously, it took up to 20
hours weekly to oversee 40 TBs of backups. Moreover, the ability to add greater
functionality has enabled RCHT to move beyond data protection and
embrace modern data management.

With CommVault Simpana 9’s capacity licensing model, RCHT
has broadened its capabilities without having to engage in
separate cost analyses for each new feature or functionality acquired. As a
result, RCHT has achieved flexibility in supporting its VMware
vSphere ESX environment.

Andi Patrick, backup and recovery specialist engineer, Royal
Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust said: "We
have all sorts of requirements for safeguarding and retaining different types
of data that require sound backup, recovery and retention strategies. CommVault
Simpana software not only helps us keep pace with steady data growth, it’s enabled
us to move beyond just protecting data to truly managing it for greater
business benefit."

"CommVault’s capacity licensing
alleviates a big headache for me. I no longer have to clear budget hurdles and
perform in-depth cost analysis before adding a new capability, which enables me
to respond so much faster and more efficiently to new business requirements."

"Being able to
keep an eye on storage growth from a single console is highly beneficial.
There’s so much data out there and with CommVault’s SRM and content indexing,
we can find data faster and easier. In the future, others will have access to a
self-search capability to simplify information governance and improve the audit
process."

"We haven’t had
to increase capacity footprint yet, which is incredibly unusual given our
constant expansions. We have a much clearer idea of where we’ll be in six
months or a year. With Simpana software, we’ll be able to do more with our data
than we thought was possible."