Veeam Helps Canadian Mental Health and Addiction Hospital Deliver Patient-Centered Care

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Toronto, ONT, Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has deployed its software to ensure 24.7.365 availability of the critical applications and data used by physicians and staff to deliver the right care at the right time in the right place.

With 3,000 employees across Ontario, CAMH is Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital and a research center, transforming the lives of more than 30,000 patients annually with care and services that support healing and recovery.

“Healthcare is heavily reliant on information technology,” said Alan Tang, team lead of the Web and portal information management group, CAMH. “In order to deliver on our promise of patient-centered care, our physicians and staff need 24.7.365 access to applications and data. And with Veeam, that’s exactly what we get.“

In the past, Tang and his colleagues tried three separate backup products to ensure round-the-clock availability, but results were always disappointing. Slow, unreliable recovery of their Hyper-V VMs made CAMH vulnerable to downtime and data loss. This also complicated critical business processes such as upgrading SharePoint, used to document staff training, scheduling and procedures. Additionally, CAMH data was increasing by up to 25% each year, primarily in SharePoint and public-facing web sites that patients and families rely on for vital resources such as emergency treatment information. To eliminate these vulnerabilities, CAMH needed a solution that would guarantee 24.7.365 availability and was scalable.

After a technology review, CAMH selected Veeam Backup & Replication. A part of the Veeam Availability Suite, the backup, restore and replication capabilities of Backup & Replication provides fast, flexible, and reliable recovery of virtualized applications and data. It brings backup and replication together in a single solution with support for vSphere and Hyper-V virtual environments. The solution leverages investments in virtualization, storage and cloud technologies to meet SLAs with recovery time and point objectives of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

As a result, Backup & Replication enhances CAMH’s capacity to deliver true patient-centered care by ensuring physicians and staff have 24.7.365 access to applications and data, regardless of data growth.

Veeam also has helped CAMH transform and simplify business processes, including auditing, software updates and web development. CAMH uses Veeam for onsite backup of 10TB on 108 Hyper-V VMs and offsite replication to Nimble CS-Series arrays. Nimble snapshots are replicated between data centers as well, giving CAMH redundant recovery. Because of Veeam’s built in deduplication and Nimble’s compression, replicas require one-tenth the storage it used to require.

“Veeam is the only Availability solution we have used that makes us fully confident in our recovery plans,” continued Tang. “Knowing we have reliable backups and replicas to restore from is huge. Being able to deliver information 24.7.365 and meet our DR requirements without blood, sweat and tears is tremendous. Plus, the ease with which we can move forward with a web change, software patch, system upgrade, and industry audit without anxiety and hesitation helps us serve the organization better.“

As a healthcare provider, CAMH must perform regular DR testing to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

According to Tang: “During an audit, we have to prove we can deliver IT services within a reasonable amount of time following a disaster. It’s so easy to demonstrate compliance with Veeam. We pull up backups and replicas and restore from them in minutes.“

Veeam’s technology has further helped CAMH become innovative and agile in software and system upgrades by taking advantage of the many capabilities of its Virtual Lab. Through this, they can test software patches and upgrades before putting them into production and migrate VMs from old hardware to new hardware. Tang and his colleagues also do a fair amount of web development, which tends to iterate quickly. Veeam transformed this business process as well.

“We test automation code before pushing it up to our web site and SSL patches to keep our sites secure,” added Tang. “Our goal is for CAMH to be up and running at all times, but we want IT to be invisible. Veeam plays a big role in helping us meet our goal.“

“Organizations today need 24.7.365 Availability, and in no area is this more critical than healthcare,” said Doug Hazelman, VP of product strategy, Veeam. “CAMH understood that nothing less than true Availability would do, and the team wasn’t going to stop until their staff had 24.7.365 access to the applications and data they needed to deliver the right care exactly when and where it was needed. Just as CAMH listens to their patients, we listen to our customers. We’re gratified to be ‘just what the doctor ordered’ for CAMH and support the tremendous efforts of this organization.“