University of Utah Health Care Meets HIPAA Requirements and Improves Efficiency of Data Protection with Sepaton S2100

Sepaton, Inc., maker of the world's fastest and most scalable data protection solutions for large enterprises, today announced that University of Utah Health Care (UUHC) deployed the S2100® data protection platform, replacing an incumbent deduplication solution, enabling them to easily meet backup windows, simplify the tape staging process for efficient long-term storage, and store more data in less disk space through significantly improved deduplication ratios.

UUHC is a leading health care system affiliated with the University of Utah. UUHC data center backs up approximately 15 TB/day and 1.7-2.0 PB per month. They manage and protect a total of 7 PB of data from both the University and healthcare organizations by backing up data, then staging it and copying it to tape for long-term storage to comply with the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). “We had a non-scalable deduplication system, but we outgrew it in 4 months. Since our data volumes are growing at approximately 20 percent annually, we needed a system that could scale out to meet our needs. We were always moving data off the disk to reclaim capacity,” said Rung Chuon, systems administrator, UUHSC. “It was a management nightmare.” Performance also suffered as its inline deduplication slowed the backup process as data volumes grew.

“We conduct the most difficult proof-of-concepts (POCs) possible,” said Daniel Thor, systems administrator, UUHSC. UUHSC not only treated the POC systems like they were in full production, they pushed them hard to find their limits. The Sepaton S2100-ES3 gateway met their POC challenges with ease. “The POC we did on the Sepaton system was the smoothest we have ever conducted,” noted Thor. “We were also impressed with the level of service Sepaton provided throughout the process.”

Sepaton: Surpassing Expectations

The Sepaton system was installed and running quickly and seamlessly, using NetBackup OST over Fibre Channel. The backup performance has exceeded expectations. “You can throw as much data at it as you want and it just handles it,” said Thor. “Before Sepaton, we fought to meet our backup windows. With Sepaton, we meet our windows and everything is clean. Restore times are also faster.”

Before Sepaton, they could only use four streams to backup 13-15TB of storage for one of their key Oracle databases. With Sepaton, they can use 10 streams and complete the backups fifty percent faster than before.

The Sepaton S2100 made the UUHSC tape staging process significantly less time consuming and more efficient. “With our old systems, the staging/clean-up process would hold us up. With the Sepaton technology, ingest is always fast and all cleanup is done in the background,” said Chuon.

“Because the Sepaton system knows the data backup and data type, it is much more efficient at reclaiming scratch tapes and unused capacity,” said Thor. “The result is, the system runs seamlessly and our pagers don’t go off in the middle of the night anymore.”

Sepaton S2100 also provided significantly better deduplication ratios than the previous system. They are getting up to 3:1 capacity reclamation on their largest Oracle database and as much as 5.7:1 overall. “We are storing far more data in less physical space,” said Chuon. The Sepaton system will enable them to add processing nodes and capacity as their data volumes grow. “Because of deduplication and compression, we are currently only using 89 TB of the 212 TB of raw capacity currently allocated in our Sepaton system,” said Chuon.

“UUHC decided to conduct a thorough evaluation, including a proof-of-concept test on leading disk-based data protection systems competitors, so we knew they were serious about getting it right. This is exactly the opportunity we relish to demonstrate that Sepaton’s performance, scalability, deduplication and reliability is second to none,” said Tim Butchart, senior vice president of worldwide sales, Sepaton.

About Sepaton, Inc.

Sepaton delivers the world’s fastest, most scalable and cost-efficient data protection solutions designed to enable large, data-intensive enterprises to store, move, access and protect critical data with the fastest recovery time in the event of a failure. Built on modular, grid-scalable architectures, Sepaton offers the S2100-ES3 for virtual tape library environments and the VirtuoSO for network attached storage (NAS) featuring multi-protocol support, highly efficient deduplication, performance-optimized data movement, and advanced management and reporting at the lowest total cost of ownership. Sepaton is headquartered in Marlborough, MA, and has an office in London. For additional information call 866-Sepaton or visit http://www.Sepaton.com.

Sepaton, S2100, DeltaRemote, and DeltaStor are registered trademarks and ContentAware, DBeXstream, and DeltaScale are trademarks of Sepaton, Inc. All other brand and product names are or may be trademarks of their respective owners.