Aspen Healthcare installs EVault backup and recovery appliances

i365, Inc., A Seagate Company (NASDAQ:STX), today announced that Aspen Healthcare, a private health care provider operating four medical facilities throughout the UK, has replaced its tape-based backup solution with EVault Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliances.

“We won't sell or support anything we don't believe in 100 percent. So we test new products from a technical and a commercial point of view. We do our best to break them. The EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance passed every test”

For Aspen's IT department, which manages a wide area network involving 35 servers and hundreds of user accounts, it's not only a strategic imperative to be especially diligent with its vital patient data, it's the law. The UK's Data Protection Act (of 1998) set in-place requirements for Aspen to establish appropriate processes, which address the unique and sensitive nature of their patients' personal data and ensure confidentiality.

"Backing up to tape has always been reliable but was also a worry. The process is slow and, with multiple tapes and multiple servers, logistically complex. We were backing up at least once a day, but needed to move to multiple backups. In addition, like all organisations we are always improving to mitigate against a disaster," said David Williams, IT director at Aspen.

Aspen's IT team oversaw an evaluation of several backup solutions, including i365's EVault line of disk-based data protection products. In the end they were won over by the simplicity of EVault. Most notably that the solution could back up a single server at any time, and compress the data by more than 85 percent. A typical Aspen SQL database went from a native size of 47GB to 5.6GB, a footprint just 12 percent of the original. This combination of performance advantages led Aspen to upgrade to a pair of EVault Plug-n-Protect appliances for its Wimbledon office and head office in central London.

The solution was sold through Cristie Data, an i365 reseller, which recommended EVault after visiting Aspen to learn more about its data protection needs. "We won't sell or support anything we don't believe in 100 percent. So we test new products from a technical and a commercial point of view. We do our best to break them. The EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance passed every test," said Steve Blakemore, product & marketing manager at Cristie.

EVault has simplified Aspen's management processes for data backups. The company now has an extremely limited management requirement regarding backup tapes, and can check backups for all servers in a single solution. Further, the IT team can monitor everything from the EVault Central Control management console.

Williams continued: "We now capture our critical data in three-hour windows or snapshots. EVault could capture backups once an hour if necessary, but three hours is sensible given our bandwidth. Previously we could only back up our SQL databases that frequently."

In Cristie, Williams and his team found an IT partner for the future. "From delivery to deployment, including training and configuration, in less than a week, Cristie worked hard to find us the best solution, and i365 worked with us to set it up for our environment. It's been smooth sailing ever since."