Sharp Healthcare Prescribes CommVault Simpana

CommVault announced that Sharp Healthcare, a San Diego-based not-for-profit integrated regional health care delivery system, has reported that it has slashed backup time in half, increased disaster recovery capabilities and reduced the risk associated with non-compliance with HIPAA regulations since deploying CommVault Data Protection, one of the five core modules in the Simpana® 7.0 software suite.

As a health care provider with more than 14,000 employees, 2,600 physicians on its hospital medical staffs and 1,500 physicians in affiliated medical groups, Sharp Healthcare pays fastidious attention to safeguarding approximately 20 TBs of vital data residing on nearly 600 Microsoft and Linux file servers. An 11-person distributed systems support team supports a variety of mission-critical Oracle and SQL applications along with healthcare-specific technologies, such as an all-digital Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS) for capturing, storing and distributing all medical images.

With storage growing by more than 25 percent annually, Sharp HealthCare decided to migrate to a more reliable and advanced data protection platform. In seeking a replacement from Symantec Backup Exec, Sharp sought centralized management and policy-driven automation to support disk-to-disk-to-tape backups, comprehensive reporting, improved media management, as well as media agents for Linux, NetApp’s NDMP protocol and VMware.

After conducting a thorough exam of Symantec Veritas NetBackup, HP Data Protector and CommVault Galaxy data protection, Sharp HealthCare determined that CommVault’s enterprise-class software features and Singular Information Management approach met all its criteria. With CommVault software’s multi-streaming functionality and seamless integration with NetApp, for example, Sharp has reported that they have reduced the time for full backups by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, nearly instantaneous disk-based file restores enables Sharp HealthCare to consistently meet recovery time objectives.

According to Gil Tuquero, manager of distributed systems support for Sharp HealthCare, the biggest productivity boost comes from CommVault’s centralized management console which has enabled consolidated data protection for all locations, as well as delegation of daily operations to other staffers. "Our team used to spend more than four hours a night watching backups and now other staffers monitor backups in minutes, allowing us to focus on more strategic initiatives," he says. "Built-in reporting with trend analysis and audit trails along with high-availability features, such as automatic fail-over and load balancing, demonstrate CommVault’s commitment to the latest industry innovations."

Additionally, Sharp HealthCare has benefited from the ease with which CommVault can restore data to dissimilar hardware to accelerate regular disaster recovery drills. Moreover, simplified media management with CommVault’s VaultTracker software enables automation of the management, tracking and reporting of offsite tapes for enhanced disaster recovery, compliance and legal discovery.

For more information about Sharp Healthcare’s CommVault deployment