Greenville Hospital System (GHS)

Story Details

GHS specializes in treatments for heart disease, women's and children's health, emergency medicine, and neurological and orthopedic ailments. While GHS is focused on providing the best remedies for its patients and the communities it supports, the healthcare provider found that its data backup system was in critical condition. A proliferation of data and an aging backup system that relied on multiple backup methods and media had pushed GHS's backup window to 24 hours. The slow and unreliable backup process left some patient data unprotected. This placed GHS in danger of violating the HIPAA requirements for data protection and availability, which could have resulted in hefty fines. It took one full–time–equivalent senior network engineer to track and complete backups that involved manually mounting and dismounting tape cartridges. Backups onto old tape technology were also error–prone. Combined with lengthy backups, this meant data and applications were sometimes unavailable, which in turn cut into employee productivity. To add to these ills, it took IT staff hours to restore data accidentally deleted by end users.

To restore its backup processes to good health and reduce escalating media costs, GHS asked Sun to provide the cure. After evaluating several vendor proposals, GHS selected Sun because of its quick timeline for project implementation, ability to help the hospital leverage its existing Sun storage technology and commitment to minimize reliance on GHS IT staff during the project.

The Sun solution has brought wellness to GHS, providing positive business, financial and technology outcomes. A single, standardized and automated backup procedure using high–capacity tape drives reduced the backup timeframe 75 percent, from 24 hours to 6 hours, allowing GHS to safely and consistently meet HIPAA's mandates. A junior–level administrator spends two hours per day overseeing backups, resulting in a 75 percent reduction in labor hours. The automated process also eliminates backup failures and helps employees remain maximally productive. Data and applications are available when needed and data restoration requests are consistently met. This has allowed the IT group to enhance service–level agreements, delivering higher availability levels to its internal clients.

By ridding itself of its failure-prone digital linear tape devices and 8 mm drives and consolidating onto reliable, high-capacity media, GHS dramatically reduced its cost per gigabyte. With a 5,000-fold increase in tape capacity and 43 percent faster throughput, GHS can use its existing Sun StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library more efficiently, thereby extending the value of its investment.

Evolving regulatory requirements, new imaging technologies and an increasing number of healthcare applications will continue to feed GHS's data growth. GHS, however, is resting comfortably, assured that its Sun backup solution provides ample room for growth.