Riverside Healthcare Selects Cohesity for Data Management with Epic EHR

Challenges

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 HIPPA 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 percent 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.

Riverside Healthcare aimed for the following capabilities in a data management solution:

• Seamless integration with HPE ecosystem
• Reliable and efficient backups for Epic EHR
• Simplified and intuitive management that allows staff to focus less on management, and more on strategic projects
• Capabilities for future scalability and expanded use cases, including cloud archival and Microsoft Exchange backups

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 DataProtect and DataPlatform across the entire organization. Cohesity is backing up more than 3PB 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 HIPPA laws and for now Riverside will hold data locally.

Cohesity has reduced backup and restore times so significantly that at first it almost wasn’t believable compared to our previous environment. We now exceed the backup SLAs for Epic, have more than 50 times data reduction, and gained time savings of 70 percent for backup and restore. We are confident Cohesity will scale to meet future requirements and keep up with exponential data growth at Riverside Healthcare.”

– Troy Caliteux, System Administrator