Ochsner Health System Deploying EMC VMAX and VPLEX

EMC Corporation announced that Ochsner Health System, southeast Louisiana’s
non-profit healthcare delivery system, has implemented an EMC backup and recovery infrastructure to protect its IT environment.

With eight hospitals, thirty eight health centers and over 12,000 employees,
Ochsner’s diverse and growing IT requirements were straining its
legacy backup systems, and it was becoming difficult for the organization to
meet its backup windows and keep pace with its SLAs.

The new EMC backup and recovery solution – which includes EMC Avamar, Data
Domain, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor and Disk Library for mainframe – has
improved Ochsner’s backup performance and staff productivity, while better
positioning the organization to pursue its private cloud strategy. Ochsner also
deployed EMC VMAX and EMC VPLEX for its enterprise storage infrastructure
solution to enhance application performance and provide HA for applications.

Customer Benefits:

• Backup and Recovery Performance:
  In spite of exponential data growth, Ochsner completes all its backups well
  within backup windows. This includes multiple use cases and data types across
  both its open system and mainframe environments. In addition, the integrated
  NetWorker and Data Domain solution has enabled Ochsner to meet the SLA
  requirement of being able to restore a 6TB Epic Cache database in less than
  six hours.
• Operational Efficiency: With EMC backup automation and the elimination of tape, Ochsner is
  saving countless man hours, and their entire backup infrastructure is now
  managed by approximately 75% of a single staff member’s time. Data Protection
  Advisor enables unified monitoring and management of the entire Ochsner backup
  infrastructure.
• Backup Capacity and Network
  Requirements: With EMC deduplication technologies, network bandwidth for
  backup data has been reduced by 99%, and backup storage capacity requirements
  have been reduced by a factor of 50x on Avamar virtual backups, and up to 38x
  on virtualized Epic and Oracle databases via Ochsner’s integrated NetWorker and
  Data Domain solution.
• Elimination of Tape Infrastructure and
  Costs: Ochsner Health System has eliminated over 2,300 tapes and
  decommissioned a large tape library, saving on media, handling costs and
  reducing its backup footprint.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

Ochsner has seen growth in recent years, creating a surge in demand for IT
services and an expansion of its infrastructure, which was
affecting application performance, extending data backup windows, and straining
IT staffing resources. Ochsner needed to upgrade both its backup and recovery
systems as well as its ageing storage infrastructure, and turned to EMC.

Ochsner Health System replaced its IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and tape backup
system with an integrated EMC backup and recovery solution to provide
protection of its virtualized and physical infrastructures and achieve a tapeless environment. More than 800 virtual machines and 200 applications
at Ochsner, such as Epic EMR, virtualized Oracle databases, Citrix, and more
are now protected with its EMC backup and recovery solution.

To deliver improved application performance and reliability while
enabling more efficient patient care, Ochsner selected EMC VMAX and EMC VPLEX
for its Epic EMR infrastructure.

Doug Lauterbach, assistant VP, technology, Ochsner, said: "With EMC Avamar, we have seen a quantum
improvement in how quickly we can restore our VMs. Avamar’s protection of both
our virtual and physical servers is absolutely accelerating our virtualization
and private cloud strategy. With the intelligence and
automation of EMC’s backup and recovery infrastructure, we’ve saved countless
hours of administrative time while eliminating significant costs associated
with off-site tape storage and tapes. Even as our environment has grown
dramatically, we’re still able to manage all of our backup operations with
approximately 75% of a single administrator’s time. We can focus more on
delivering new applications and services that improve healthcare, rather than
simply managing technology. The fluidity and integration across the Avamar and
Data Domain products have allowed us to satisfy some very complex backup
requirements within a cohesive framework."

Willy Schley, technology director, Ochsner, said: "Since deploying Avamar, we’ve more than doubled the volume of our
backup data and still stay within our ten-hour backup window.

"With a 60:1 deduplication ratio on
Avamar data, we’ve reduced our network bandwidth and storage requirements by
99.2%. So on a daily average basis, 31.2TB of data is written to only
230GB of physical space. Not only do these efficiency gains improve
performance but they preserve our infrastructure and reduce our expenditures.

"Data Domain has enabled some
significant data deduplication ratios including a 38:1 for Epic. In addition,
we have reduced our Oracle backup data by 90.3%. We’re maintaining our backup
windows for Epic and Oracle despite their dramatic growth.

"Epic requires us to restore the
Epic database from a backup in under six hours. With our Cache database sized
at 6TB, it’s not easy to find a solution to do that. Data Domain
Boost and NetWorker turned out to be the perfect combination."