New Jersey Hospitals Offered Standardized Data Backup

Hospital association signs on with hosted service to ease data restores

By Lucas Mearian

November 28, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - The New Jersey Hospital Association last week said it has contracted with a hosted data storage service provider to offer its 112 member hospitals a single method of backing up and restoring critical data to and from an off-site facility.
The move is part of a growing trend among industry organizations that are trying to ease storage management headaches for their members.
The hospital association said that so far, two member hospitals have contracted for the service, which is being provided by IPR International LLC in Conshohocken, Pa.
Ten other hospitals are "imminently interested" in the service, said an IPR spokeswoman.
Karen Graham, CIO at Cooper Hospital University Medical Center in Mt. Laurel, N.J., said Cooper became the first member of the NJHA to lease the IPR product two years ago, long before the organization began offering it to its membership.

Graham:
"Tape was a medium I didn't want to deal with anymore."

Graham said she likes the idea of a single backup/disaster recovery service for all area hospitals. During natural disasters, such as the recent spate of hurricanes, it can be reassuring to know that all organizations can recover data at the same rate.
"If you're triaging patients from north to south, it's nice to know that my counterparts can recover data to the same degree we can," she said.
State of Concern
Graham said that before signing with the hosted service, Cooper Hospital had an direct-attached storage architecture that used Computer Associates International Inc.'s BrightStor ARCserve software to back up data to tape drives.
That system required up to two full-time employees to manage backup configurations, check logs and deal with backup jobs that either didn't run or encountered errors.
"The state of backups were of a grave concern to me. We had an e-mail server crash, and operators were pulling tapes off [drives] that were mislabeled, so I had no clue how recent the data was that we'd be able to recover," Graham said.
It took 72 hours to recover the system, she added.
Graham said the server crash set the stage for the effort to seek a storage service provider. "Tape was a medium I didn't want to deal with anymore," she said.
Graham now replicates 1.5TB of data to IPR's off-site data center over a T1 line. The entire e-mail server can be restored in about six hours, she said.

Hosted Storage

Most hosted storage service providers use:

Bluepoint Data Storage Inc. services using IBM's Tivoli software

Incentra Solutions Inc. services using technology from CommVault Systems Inc. and Symantec Corp.

EVault Inc. products without a service provider

LiveVault Corp. products without a service provider

Asigra Inc. products without a service provider

Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc. services using technology from Avamar Technologies Inc.

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