Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers Deploying ExaGrid and Veeam

ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers (PRI) its ExaGrid disk-based backup systems to increase data protection with secure backups.

PRI is a provider of professional liability insurance for physicians and medical facilities being the second largest medical malpractice insurer in New York State and one of the top ten in the US.

It replaced its previous system with ExaGrid and Veeam Software, Inc. after its IT staff spent too much time troubleshooting backup issues.

Al Villani, PRI’s senior system administrator, said: “Veritas NetBackup wasn’t set up to send us any kind of alerts if there was an issue, so we had to log in and look through it, which was a lot of manual work. Our calls to Symantec support were sent offshore right away, and by the time they got back to us, we had usually found the solution by searching online. Veritas eventually reacquired NetBackup, but the support never improved.“

ExaGrid solved backup issues PRI had struggled with, including: 

• Storage capacity issues
• Backups that exceeded window, slowing company-wide systems during workday
• Time-consuming backup management
• Complicated offsite storage

The security of storage in the insurance industry has been moving toward stricter regulation, so PRI looked for a solution that would help keep the company ahead of the curve.

“The insurance claims we process contain sensitive information, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers-even the tape we used was encrypted, the cases we stored them in were locked, and Iron Mountain had to sign for them-the state regulations are pretty thorough when it comes to security. Many solutions don’t offer encryption or the ability to encrypt at rest like ExaGrid does,” said Villani.

A major issue that PRI faced was that its backups took days and slowed the entire system down, impacting workflow,.

Villani continues: “Our weekly full backup used to run from Saturday morning at 2:00 a.m. all the way into Tuesday afternoon. Every Monday, users would be calling in and asking why the system was so slow. Now, our weekly full takes just three hours! We thought something was broken the first time we used ExaGrid, so we called our support engineer who confirmed that everything ran correctly. It’s totally incredible! Working with our [ExaGrid] support engineer has been a saving grace. Managing backups had been a nightmare at times, but switching to ExaGrid has been a dream come true. We’re saving about 25-30 hours a week on managing backups. The ExaGrid system doesn’t need a lot of babysitting, and our support engineer is available whenever we need help with any issue.“

As an insurance company, PRI has a complex retention policy for its data.

“We keep five weeks of daily backups, eight weeks of weekly backups, a year’s worth of monthly backups onsite, and one yearly onsite with seven yearlies offsite, as well as offsite storage for infinite fiscals and monthly backups,” said Villani. “We were skeptical at first that an ExaGrid system could handle that amount of storage, but the engineers sized everything really well and ExaGrid guaranteed the sizing would work for two years, and that if we needed to add another appliance, they would supply it. Seeing that in writing was pretty impressive.“

PRI customer success story