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Medi-Clinic maximizes backup strategy with Breakpoint Solutions and DCC

Overland’s REO delivers simple, efficient and cost effective solution to healthcare provider’s disappearing backup windows.

[20 April 2007]

Mediclinic, an established leader in the private hospital industry in South Africa, has implemented a R700 000 Overland backup solution from reseller Breakpoint Solutions and distributor Drive Control Corporation (DCC) to improve its backup windows and time to restore. The solution has improved reliability, increased capacity and reduced the healthcare provider’s operational and management cost while making use of existing investments.

Explains Sean Watson, IT Operations Supervisor at Medi-Clinic: “Our data was being backed up to LTO tape drives in a slow tape library. As the backups were taking too long, administration was becoming difficult and the costs of sustaining current methods were high, we decided to review our backup strategy and improve our setup.”

Medi-Clinic accepted Breakpoint Solutions’ proposal to implement Overland’s REO9000 Disk appliances after doing a thorough price/benefits comparison. Says Digby Webb from Breakpoint Solutions: “We carefully evaluated the benefits of the REO appliances in conjunction with a return on investment justification. The REO appliances offered the opportunity to improve on many facets of the existing method, primarily speed and price, and we thus proposed that a REO appliance be used in conjunction with Medi-Clinic’s existing tape library at Head Office.”

Notes Watson: “In addition to meeting our solution criteria, we selected Breakpoint Solutions as it is an Overland Silver Partner and has a close relationship with Overland Storage. This coupled with its strong ties to the local distributor Drive Control Corporation, who is the sole, certified Overland service provider in South Africa, has allowed them to roll out many successful Overland installations to date. They pride themselves in their ability to install and support the entire Overland range of backup products. Assisted by DCC, the reseller has provided us with a solution that allowed us to backup all our important data in an efficient, yet simple and cost effective manner.”

Two Overland REO9000 Disk Backup Appliances each configured with 24 x 500GB SATA disks were installed, giving Medi-Clinic a total of 24TB. The appliances are connected via Fibre Channel to the data-backup server and each unit is backed up by a three-year 24x7 onsite support contract.

Notes Raul Del Fabro, Overland Storage Specialist at DCC: “4Gbps Fibre channel HBAs in the servers allowed us to make use of the Fibre-Channel functionality of the REO9000 appliances, thus ensuring the maximum speed could be attained. In fact, the solution meets all of Medi-Clinic’s requirements: Reduces backup times; offers near-instant data restore; improves the reliability of backup and recovery operations; reduces operational, management and unwarranted hardware costs; increases capacity, makes use of existing investments; and is scaleable.”

Medi-Clinic has obtained many quantifiable benefits from the implementation. The backups are much quicker as the healthcare provider now backs up to disk. It can also backup to multiple ‘dynamic tapes’ simultaneously, where previously it would have to wait for a tape drive to finish a current job before beginning another. Medi-Clinic is, furthermore, no longer burdened with finding and mounting tapes for recent restores, as these can now quickly be copied off disk for instant recovery. In addition, the Overland REO solution has given Medi-Clinic greater flexibility, allowing it to backup a wider scope of data and offering end users a higher level of data security.

Says Watson, “We have avoided a costly upgrade to our outdated system while also separating the dual roles of our backup system, namely production systems backup and off-site tape archival. This makes upgrades and management simpler going forward. Previously, a change in either area would require a very costly upgrade to the entire system, resulting in unused capacity in at least one of the two areas.

“We are also no longer concerned about losing backups during the night to physical library issues and this gives us great peace of mind. Our time to restore is reduced with more drives available and our user satisfaction with regard to accuracy of restores has improved -- a Thursday night backup now actually completes on a Thursday night and not Friday morning at 7:30am.”

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