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Lowering total cost of data protection by 27 percent

Technology Category
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Backup & Recovery
Applicable Industries
  • Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
  • Maintenance
Use Cases
  • Predictive Maintenance
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Latrobe Community Health Service (LCHS) was facing challenges in managing its expanding data volumes and complying with stringent reporting requirements for healthcare. The company’s IT team needed to increase the flexibility, reliability, and speed of data backup and recovery. The non-profit healthcare provider’s programs generate a massive volume of highly sensitive patient data daily, the handling and protection of which is heavily regulated. Moreover, some data is required to be retained for as long as 20 years. Full-system backups that routinely took up to 36 hours amplified that risk. Beyond risk mitigation, data protection also affects Latrobe’s competitiveness as the company pursues government funding.
About The Customer
Latrobe Community Health Service (LCHS) is a non-profit healthcare provider based in Victoria, Australia. The organization offers over 120 specialized healthcare-related programs and operates eight clinics. These programs address a wide spectrum of societal needs, from nutrition counseling and children’s health to old age services and addiction treatment. The organization's IT department, led by IT manager Wayne Twite, supports over 500 employees and volunteers. The programs generate a massive volume of highly sensitive patient data daily, which is heavily regulated and some of which is required to be retained for as long as 20 years.
The Solution
To increase the flexibility, speed, and performance of Latrobe’s physical and virtual data backup and recovery infrastructure, the organization deployed IBM Spectrum Protect software (formerly Tivoli Storage Manager) and IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments software (formerly Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments). The software provided the flexibility to quickly recover files where required. Spectrum Protect’s ability to utilize VMware’s Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature reduced the time required to backup Virtual Machines and gave IT the ability to recover full VM’s in a very short period of time. The software also facilitated the opening of a new secondary site, significantly reducing the recovery period in the event of a major incident at the primary server environment.
Operational Impact
  • Recovering files with Spectrum Protect software is now a matter of a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes, a time savings of two-to-three hours over the previous backup environment.
  • The organization is consistently meeting backup requirements for various accreditation bodies, which helps with negotiating funding and acquiring new funding.
  • Due to the deduplication capabilities native to Spectrum Protect software, daily backup volumes have been reduced by 2TB.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Lowered total cost of ownership for its data backup environment by an estimated 27 percent.
  • Reduced backup volumes by 2TB.
  • Expect to see a 20 percent reduction in costs in the next three-to-five years due to not having to put extra disk space in the backup solution.

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