About
Deaconess was founded in 1892 and more than 125 years later, Deaconess Health System has grown into a 7 hospital system with more than 6,500 employees, providing high quality care to patients in a service area of 26 counties in three states (IN, IL and KY). US News & World Report recently ranked Deaconess as the number 2 hospital in Indiana. The mission of Deaconess is to ‘advance the health and well-being of our community with a compassionate and caring spirit.’
Problems and Goals
Deaconess uses a CommVault auxiliary copy operation to move 150TB (500TB rehydrated) of backup data to their secondary datacenter. While this satisfies their off-site requirement, the secondary data center and primary data center are in the same geographic region. In most disaster scenarios, the secondary data center location would be sufficient, but Deaconess required a budget-friendly solution to move backup copies to a more distant tertiary repository. Additionally, Deaconess needed to ensure that internet traffic for production workloads wasn’t affected by tertiary backups.
Solution
SIS consulted with Deaconess and recommended the use of AWS S3-IA and CommVault cloud storage integration utilizing their secondary Internet connection as the data path. This solution was implemented with minimal modifications to their existing backup processes, and more importantly, only added minimal costs to their current solution. While Glacier was an initial choice from a cost perspective, the lack of CommVault support for micro-pruning and deduplication made a Glacier based solution non-viable.
Realized Improvements
Deaconess now has the ability to quickly expand their data protection solution to account for events that affect an entire geographic region. Additionally, by using AWS S3-IA as a tertiary storage platform, coupled with existing backup software, Deaconess is able to keep operational and infrastructure costs low so their focus can remain on providing high-quality, cost-effective healthcare services to their customers.
Deaconess is currently performing post-production validation to determine which storage class will be selected for long term data protection.