Advanced Medicine(cont.)

Staying ahead of the curve in South Florida

Reaching those goals is challenging enough in a static environment, but Baptist Health is growing quickly. "We're adding 50 servers a quarter-almost one every business day," Montgomery explains.

Further driving growth is Baptist Health's expansion, such as the recent opening of a new hospital in Homestead, Florida, that is triple the size of the 120-bed facility it replaced; growth in its emergency services departments, with a new 100-bed ER being built to replace the existing, smaller ER at Baptist Hospital in Kendall; new urgent care and diagnostic centers in neighborhood-based Baptist Medical Plazas; and the planned construction of a 120-bed hospital in West Kendall in south Miami-Dade County.

With backup requirements growing 25 percent annually, the healthcare provider deployed Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery and then Veritas NetBackup across the entire organization, some 600 servers supporting about 6,100 desktops.

"We've been leveraging the Vault option in NetBackup to improve our ability to restore. If we didn't use Vault, we would have to perform a quarterly test restore to show our backups are valid. By vaulting, we satisfy that requirement from an evidence perspective."

The vaulting feature automates a process that was intensively manual before. "Five years ago, each server had its own tape unit. As a result, our operators spent a lot of time dealing with tape management."

Disaster recovery vital signs

With this rapid growth came the need to develop a disaster recovery strategy across the Baptist Health data center infrastructure. The answer for the Microsoft Windows environment was Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. "We made a small investment in having three or four servers on standby," Montgomery says. "If anything happens, we can pop the image onto those servers. Backup Exec System Recovery, combined with VMware, is our lifeline in doing so."

Baptist Health has also been using Backup Exec System Recovery for more routine restores. "Every month we take a snapshot of every Microsoft Windows-based server," explains Montgomery. "Every Tuesday is 'Patch Tuesday' for the Microsoft environment. We've had several occasions where a patch has affected another application's availability or system performance. Using Backup Exec System Recovery, we just roll back to the system prior to the patch until we can resolve the issue. That's been a saving grace for us," Montgomery claims. "You can even restore the machine onto a different box if you like."

The results of the disaster recovery solution are impressive: Baptist Health is saving US$815,000 in annual costs due to avoided system crashes and is producing US$6.79 million annually in cost avoidance through faster disaster recovery. With these results in mind, Montgomery and his team are now replicating the Microsoft Windows disaster recovery solution for their UNIX- and Linux-based environment using the Bare Metal Restore option in Veritas NetBackup.