by Kelly Baig
@KellyEHB
In 2012, Mary Rutan became a BridgeHead hospital for the first time, deploying our backup and recovery for their MEDITECH EMR application. This year, Mary Rutan elected to consolidate their backup and recovery by standardizing on BridgeHead for all of their applications. In addition, they expect to benefit greatly from BridgeHead's recent introduction of a deduplication solution which integrated HP Catalyst software for use in combination with their choice of storage devices.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Robert Reynolds, IT Director at Mary Rutan, to learn more about their experience with BridgeHead.
Q. How long has Mary Rutan Hospital been a BridgeHead customer?
Robert: Mary Rutan Hospital has been a BridgeHead customer since 2012 when we first deployed BridgeHead ISB / IDR for our MEDITECH environment.
Q. Why did Mary Rutan Hospital decide to expand its BridgeHead installation with BridgeHead Enterprise Backup?
Robert: Our existing enterprise backup solution had reached its end of life, so it was an appropriate time to research what’s new. We liked the way BridgeHead performed in the MEDITECH environment and reached out to see what options there were to expand BridgeHead into our enterprise and decided that long-term, going with BridgeHead made the most sense. We liked the BridgeHead technology and the company’s hardware agnostic stance, so it seemed like a good fit.
In addition, we were looking for a vendor who could accommodate SQL, Exchange and VM backup in a single solution rather than having to select different backup tools for each. When we saw that BridgeHead could do that, we were sold.
Q. Mary Rutan Hospital also is licensing BridgeHead Deduplication for Backup and Recovery along with integrated support for HP StoreOnce Backup. What’s the benefit that you are expecting to gain?
Robert: We expect BridgeHead Deduplication to deliver a huge long-term cost-savings to Mary Rutan Hospital. When you are looking at VTLs, SANs, and the like, for disk backup device, then you are spending a lot of money. And, it’s not a one-time expense: you have to refresh the hardware every 3-5 years with an added $30-60K for us every time. Plus, if we need to put something at a disaster site, then it’s twice that.
What we really appreciate about BridgeHead’s approach is the Virtual StoreOnce Appliance (VSA) model. This allows us to use software instead of a storage device, which automatically cuts our costs. Then, we can use the storage of our choice with the solution, which means that we’re not locked in to any single vendor. As a result, we expect to cut our storage costs by 50 to 70 percent.
Q. How does BridgeHead Deduplication for Backup and Recovery support Mary Rutan Hospital’s long-term business continuity?
Robert: Currently, the hospital is considering options for secondary storage sites. Whether we decide to partner with a healthcare specialist like INHS or go for a local option with another provider, BridgeHead provides us with an affordable way to do this.
The fact that BridgeHead also gives us the ability to spin up a VM running the VSA in a very short amount of time is also very attractive for our recovery plans. This approach takes our RTO way down, at the recovery site, without requiring us to over-invest in duplicate hardware.
Q. How about benefits to your on-site storage? How will BridgeHead Deduplication impact your efficiencies there?
Robert: A big factor for us is that we really like the deduplication approach that BridgeHead has taken. We like the technology, and we expect it will enable us to shrink our backup storage; we project that we will be able to take our backup data from 50TB down to 10TB before we store it. Once this is factored in along with more cost-effective hardware, we are looking at pennies on the dollar for our storage solution. We expect our network backup speeds to increase, too.
We are already working with HP storage; we are an HP shop. So, for us we felt more confident because BridgeHead chose to work with HP on this solution.
