Health Center Norway Reduces RTO by 99 percent with Veeam

The Business Challenge

If critical health care data isn’t available 24.7.365 to medical professionals, a patient’s life can hang in the balance. When data availability became a challenge for Health Center Norway, Hemit acted fast.

“It was time to modernise our IT infrastructure, including the recovery of critical data used by our health care professionals to treat patients,” said Geir Waterloo, Senior IT Consultant at Hemit.

The recovery time objective (RTO) for critical data was 12 hours. Hemit’s goal was to reduce RTO to minutes.

Critical data used to treat patients in Health Central Norway’s hospitals and pharmacies includes laboratory reports, X-rays and test results. Hemit synchronises this data continually so health care professionals have the most up-to-date information when they treat patients.

For example, if a patient suddenly develops a life-threatening allergy to penicillin, health care professionals must have access to this information prior to treating him. The virtual machines supporting synchronisation must be up and running 24.7.365.

“Our health care professionals require immediate access to critical data—it’s a matter of life or death,” Waterloo said.

The Veeam Solution

Hemit replaced legacy backup with Veeam® Backup & Replication™.

Veeam backs up and recovers critical data quickly and reliably for Health Center Norway. RTO decreased by 99 percent—from 12 hours to three minutes.

“Data availability can be a matter of life or death in the health care industry,” Waterloo said. “Veeam delivers 24.7.365 Availability of our critical data so health care professionals can evaluate, diagnose and treat patients accurately and efficiently.”

Veeam backs up 59 VMware vSphere virtual machines (10.5 TB) to Dell EMC Data Domain Storage. Advanced integration between Veeam and Data Domain Boost software makes backup lightning fast. Recovery is lightning fast too. A Veeam feature called Instant VM Recovery® restores a virtual machine from a backup in minutes.

“Veeam saves the day every day because backup and recovery are always fast and successful,” Waterloo said. “We wouldn’t consider anything but Veeam for backing up and recovering our most critical workloads.”

Veeam also enables Hemit to do something that wasn’t possible with legacy backup. A feature called On-Demand Sandbox™ creates an isolated environment where Hemit can test software updates and patches before deploying them in the production environment.

“This is another example of Veeam limiting our exposure to downtime,” Waterloo said. “We can’t believe how effective, easy-to-use and affordable Veeam is. Every time Veeam helps us avoid downtime, we save money .”

Hemit has future plans for Veeam. Veeam is certified on VMware vSAN, so if Hemit expands its hyper-converged platform and adds more virtual machines, Veeam will back up and recover them quickly and reliably. Waterloo said Veeam helps increase operational efficiency.

“Our mission is to provide ICT for life and health,” Waterloo said. “Veeam supports our mission.”

The Results

• Delivers 24.7.365 Availability of critical data
  Health care professionals are faced with life-or-death situations every day. Veeam delivers 24.7.365 Availability of critical data so they can treat patients accurately and efficiently.
• Helps reduce RTO by 99 percent
  Deploying Veeam was a key component of Hemit’s plan to modernise the IT infrastructure. Veeam helped Hemit reduce RTO for critical workloads from 12 hours to three minutes.
• Improves operational efficiency
  Veeam is certified for vSAN; therefore Hemit’s backup infrastructure will scale effortlessly if vSAN grows.