Global Healthcare Company – Case Study

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Permabit Helps Reduce Costs & Increases Data Security and Availablility

A 120+ year old global health care company, based in the Midwest, is focused on discovering new medicines and nutritional supplements, new technologies, and new ways to manage health. The company has over 68,000 employees and maintains sales, manufacturing, research and development, and distribution facilities worldwide. They faced growing challenges surrounding securely retaining growing volumes and types of data that were essential to its products. They turned to Permabit to help them achieve a strategic enterprise archiving strategy to help reduce costs and corporate risk.

The Challenge

As a provider of a diverse range of health care products, the company must manage enormous amounts of diverse applications and data, keeping the data accessible for internal use and regulatory compliance purposes. They began looking at new ways to better manage long–term data retention with an initial archiving project focused on VMware images, expense records, email, and clinical trial data. Due to the sensitive nature of this data, a secure and reliable archive was needed that could cost–effectively scale to accommodate expected increases in data volumes. The company leveraged an IBM Content Manager for archiving its growing email data, with the archived email replicated. The data was originally stored in an EMC Centera which presented several critical problems as a result of Centera being:

• Tied to proprietary software API’s

• Prone to failure

• Not scalable at a granular level

• Cost–prohibitive to add storage

The company needed a much less expensive, more reliable, better performing, and highly scalable storage system to meet current and future data storage and retention demands.

The Requirements

The storage architect who managed the legacy EMC solution was tasked with finding and implementing a long–term alternative. He established a stringent evaluation process that would assure the new system would have the following features:

• Disk–based Solution — removable media was too costly and labor–intensive, especially for discovery purposes

• Highly Scalable — allow storage expansion as needed without having to take the system offline

• WORM Capabilities Built–in — required to meet regulatory and internal compliance demands

• Read/Write Flexibility — able to handle non compliance data on the same volumes

• Use Open Interfaces — accept multiple data types

• Reduce Primary Storage Costs — primary storage costs had exceeded existing budgets driving an immediate need for a very cost–effective alternative

• Guarantee 100% Reliability — there is a zero tolerance policy for system outages or data loss

The Result

After reviewing a host of low–cost options, such as expanding their legacy SAN, the Permabit Enterprise Archive™ was selected as the one meeting all criteria. In fact, the initial Proof of Concept deployment was so successful the company extended the deployment into its larger enterprise archiving strategy.

Proof of Concept/Test Environment

Permabit was first deployed in an extensive proof–of–concept to test performance with the company’s actual data. During this process, it was discovered that the Permabit system’s flexibility not only allowed it to replace the EMC Centera, but it could also easily serve as a standard network share. This meant that data could be written directly to the archive, removing that burden from primary storage. It also allowed users seamless access to the data.

Additionally, shifting from EMC Centera to Permabit allowed the company to remove another layer of middleware from its overall email archival stack because there were no proprietary APIs involved. Finally, Permabit’s built–in Scalable Data Reduction™ (SDR) allowed the archive to consume much less space than it originally did on primary storage.

It became clear that Permabit’s exceptional price, scalability, and ease–of–use could be leveraged to solve other storage challenges. After the successful POC, Permabit was rolled–out to handle two storage projects, the first focused on corporate data and the second to better manage high volumes of scientific intellectual property records.

Corporate Data Archive Project

Permabit Enterprise Archive™ was swiftly deployed to handle the company’s massive email data stores. The fully replicated Permabit system was at first set to archive email not accessed for 12 months, which was soon reduced to 6 months. This aggressive retention policy immediately resulted in over 15 million files moved onto the Permabit archive.

Over time the company migrated data associated with 13 different applications, including: audited web logs, CA Records Manager data VMware images (for gold image storage), retired backup system catalogs (for legal reasons), and application retirement data to the archive. Future plans involve migrating 150 TB of data from NetApp filers and 13+ TB of sensitive chemistry data from legacy SAN and optical platters to the Permabit archive.

Permabit was able to drastically reduce not only the primary storage volumes, but once archived, the built–in data deduplicaiton feature further reduced storage volumes in the Permabit archive. The company freed up capacity on their most expensive primary storage while retaining disk–speed access to data in the Permabit archive.

Intellectual Property Protection Project

Much of the company’s intellectual property is in the form of chemical study research data that constitutes the core of its product development. This data was sitting on very old HP hardware, which was not only very expensive to maintain, but nearly impossible to expand. And, the data was unprotected, which increased corporate risk in two ways: data loss or corruption would threaten compliance with Federal retention policies, and the loss of such critical information could jeopardize its product offerings. It became evident that the company couldn’t afford to maintain the data on archaic, expensive, and vulnerable disk.

They replaced the legacy HP system with Permabit Enterprise Archive™, which is fully replicated to a remote site. Now, all historic data is securely archived on the Permabit Enterprise Archive™, offering on–demand access to the research data for discovery and product development purposes. The process has delivered a cost–effective way to expand the system to handle data growth and changing retention requirements.

Permabit Delivers Meaningful Results

Each Permabit deployment has delivered fast, meaningful benefits to users across the organization. These include:

• Dramatically lowered primary storage costs

• Reduced storage requirements by nearly 40%

• Archive leveraged far beyond the initial archiving project

• Reduced corporate risk associated with legal discovery and intellectual property protection

• Achieved ROI in less than 3 months

Permabit Supports Strategic, Long Term Archiving Vision

Enterprise archiving has become a strategic corporate initiative at this company, with Permabit at the heart of a five–year plan. The goal is to transfer all static data from primary and secondary storage devices to a Permabit Enterprise Archive™ system, which will deliver a host of long–term benefits:

• Provide substantial cost savings — drive down IT storage budgets and labor costs to support discovery processes

• Increase access to all data — allow for easy access to corporate data on a daily basis by staff, and also to help comply with discovery processes

• Reduce corporate risk — assure compliance with ever–changing government regulations

Permabit Cost Savings Examples

Figure 1: Permabit Enterprise Archive™ was quickly integrated into the company’s storage environment to handle multiple data retention projects. >> Click Here to Enlarge Image

Legacy Centera Replacement:

The company was relying on an EMC Centera system for compliance archiving, which had critical issues:

• Centera’s closed, proprietary system had limited access to data

• The system was very labor–intensive, requiring 2 full time staff to support and manage

Permabit Enterprise Archive allowed the company to:

• Dramatically cut management costs to less than a ½ full–time staff needed to manage the Permabit archive system

• Gain full access to all archived data to speed discovery processes

Replace Removable Media

The company was unable to perform discovery from its extensive tape archive to support numerous legal suits.

Permabit allowed the company to:

• Perform fast, complete discovery across all data, reducing risk

• Protect all data with Permabit’s built–in WORM capabilities

Find out More

Contact Permabit today to learn how Permabit can work at your company to reduce costs while best managing long–term data retention. Call us at: 617–252–9600 or email at info@permabit.com.