Riverside Healthcare selects Cohesity for data management with Epic EHR

Riverside Healthcare is a fully-integrated healthcare system serving patient needs throughout five counties in the state of Illinois. The provider runs Riverside Medical Center, a 300-bed Level II Trauma hospital, offering a full range of inpatient and outpatient care and the medical group includes more than 140 primary and specialty care providers. The healthcare system has earned numerous awards including 10-time recipient of the Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals award, a multi-year recipient of Healthgrades Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence Award, as well as designated as a 2018 Health Care’s Most Wired Hospital by the American Hospital Association’s Health Forum.

The Challenge

While Riverside Healthcare is a relatively small healthcare provider compared to other larger national hospitals, any medical provider regardless of size deals with large volumes of data that are often retained indefinitely, and must meet strict HIPAA regulations. Riverside is a majority HPE environment, using Hewlett Packard for storage and server systems, including the all-flash HPE 3PAR. Riverside runs Epic for all electronic health records (EHR) and has more than 500 VMs across an environment that is 90% virtualized.

Several years ago, Riverside moved away from Dell EMC NetWorker and deployed a Commvault solution, however it had become cumbersome and difficult to manage and the provider was dependent upon one senior administrator who held the knowledge to troubleshoot the system.

When licensing costs also became exorbitant, and failures were more frequent, Riverside began to look for a solution for reliable backup and recovery, especially when it came to Epic. As the provider’s main database for patient data, there were limited timeframes to complete Epic backups, and Riverside is looking to eliminate cloning the databases to take snapshots.

The Solution

Riverside looked at several solution providers, including Cohesity and Veeam, and chose Cohesity for robust performance, efficient datacenter footprint, and the ability to have the entire backup system in a single unit. After a successful Proof of Concept (PoC) over six months, Riverside implemented Cohesity across the entire organization. Cohesity is backing up more than 3 PB of data, including Epic and CPAC systems, SQL databases, close to 300 VMs, 18 physical servers, as well as hundreds of protected objects, and more than 400 additional databases.

Riverside will soon deploy Cohesity for seamless integration with Kroll Ontrack PowerControls to allow the provider to back up Microsoft Exchange to enable restores of individual emails, as well as writing a copy to its disaster recovery site for long-term email archival.

Although the healthcare provider is not currently using the cloud, Riverside also purchased Cohesity CloudSpin for possible future archival of a full copy of its data as part of its disaster recovery plan. Cloud retention is more complex due to HIPAA laws and for now Riverside will hold data locally.

The Results

Riverside Healthcare saw tangible results immediately. Riverside experienced significant space efficiency gains with Cohesity’s global variable-length deduplication and compression, reporting needing only 54 TiB of usable capacity to store more than 3 PiB of logical data, resulting in more than a 50x data reduction rate.

With HPE 3Par on the backend for faster processing, Cohesity’s seamless integration with HPE has enabled Riverside to move data rapidly in its environment. The IT Team has seen impressive results to blow its SLAs for Epic out of the water, impressing the Epic team and ensuring scalability and reliability as the Epic roadmap evolves. While Epic suggests an SLA for restores of four hours for 1 TB, now Cohesity is able to restore nearly 3 TB in under four hours.

Epic grows at a massive rate each year, and Riverside expects the growth rate to double in two years, so being able to back up the entire EHR system in less than three hours instead of 11 hours for an incremental backup is transformational. Overall, the provider has reduced backup times by nearly 70% across the entire environment, creating phenomenal efficiency for the IT staff, and lightening the network load.

Riverside has also restored entire VMs with Cohesity, completing the full process of storage vMotion to primary storage in a single step to deliver an end-to-end solution. Previously this process took hours and now a restore of a VM is completed in 20 minutes.

Riverside can now restore to a more granular level than previously achieved. Before, it may have taken an hour just to locate a file, but with Cohesity files are located within seconds thanks to global search and indexing, and it only takes a few clicks to recover. Cohesity has even allowed the IT team to troubleshoot across its environment to determine if files that don’t quite look right are corrupted or need to be restored, with the ability to complete a restore in under five minutes instead of hours.

Key Benefits

• Cost savings of more than 30%, when compared to Commvault
• Time of backups reduced by nearly 70% with improved system backups for SQL
• Simplified management, freeing up time for IT administrators
• Capability to back up Microsoft Exchange and restore individual emails
• More than 50x data reduction with Cohesity compression and deduplication, yielding significant savings