Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

Sun StorageTek Helps Top Academic Medical Center Reduce Backup Time and Improve Patient Care

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, one of the nation's pre-eminent academic medical centers, operates 1,298 acute care, rehabilitation and long-term care beds, and provides outpatient and community health and information services through 20 affiliated hospitals and 87 satellite clinics across two states. The center’s three major institutions—Wake Forest University Health Sciences, North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Physicians—rank among the top in the nation.

Customer Challenges

Improve backup speeds for critical data
Enhance data availability, accuracy and integrity to comply with federal regulations
Improve network performance and providers’ access to network resources
Improve IT staff productivity and extend IT resources by reducing system failures

Solution

The center replaced its existing storage system with a solution from Sun StorageTek that provided centralized nightly backup for more than 260 systems, reducing backup time and improving system availability. Sun storage consultants led the installation process, ensuring a smooth and timely migration.

Business Results

Reduced backup time by 87% , significantly improving network availability
Reduced media failures by 90%, vastly improving data integrity, required for compliance with federal regulations such as HIPAA
Enhanced end-user access to business-critical systems and applications
Significantly reduced IT staff time devoted to fixing system failures, freeing staff to proactively manage the network

Products and Services

Story Details

As one of the most respected teaching hospital groups in the country, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC) is adept at collecting and disseminating information—both to the center’s patients and to its medical students and staff. But saving, storing and retrieving that information proved increasingly challenging, and the center’s data storage systems were beginning to adversely affect its ability to provide the best possible healthcare to patients.

The time required for nightly data backup was excessive, made the center’s network largely unavailable to end users, and strained network resources, often resulting in significant media failure and data corruption. The physical space required by existing tape drives and tapes was enormous, and IT staff had to store, maintain and manually mount and manage some 30,000 tapes—both difficult and time-consuming chores. The existing solution had also reached capacity. In short, the center’s data storage needs had surpassed its capabilities.

" Sun StorageTek did a tremendous job of diagnosing our needs and helping us size the new system correctly—both for our current and our future needs. I feel very comfortable with our decision to work with Sun and look forward to a continued relationship. "

— Bob Massengill, Manager of Technical Services, Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

With the lease on the existing drives set to expire, WFUBMC administrators sought a solution that could address these issues and provide scalability as the center’s needs evolved. Sun StorageTek recommended a comprehensive solution, and Sun storage consultants handled the implementation and completed the migration in less than six weeks.

Today, backup times for centralized nightly backups for more than 260 disparate systems across WFUBMC’s facilities have been reduced by 87 percent—significantly increasing network availability. Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) combined with the Sun StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library has reduced media failures by nearly 90 percent by replacing the tape system with an automated disk-to-disk system. A second PowderHorn installed in the primary data center provides disaster recovery capabilities. With data integrity protected, WFUBMC is better prepared to comply with federal archival and patient privacy and record portability regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

Sun StorageTek FlexLine 600 Series storage system has eliminated 98 percent of the tapes required for backup, allowing the center to reclaim extensive data center floor space and freeing IT staff to attend to other, critical IT issues such as proactive network maintenance and troubleshooting.

Finally, end-users—health care providers, students, educators and center administrators—now have increased access to the network and systems, improving patient billing and admissions processes, as well as enhancing patient care by making patient data readily accessible 24 hours a day.

As importantly, the Sun solution can scale to meet the center’s data needs well into the future, providing a return on investment not available through the leased equipment. Thanks to Sun, WFUBMC is ideally positioned to efficiently and cost-effectively respond to the exponential increase in patient data anticipated in the future, as well as the increasingly rigorous requirements on data security and privacy. As a result, the center will be able to focus its resources on its core business—improving the health and well being of its patients.