Synergy Medical Education Alliance
Synergy Medical selects StoreVault for healthier IT environment
Customer Overview
The Synergy Medical Education Alliance was formed in 1969 to coordinate community-wide medical education activities in the Saginaw community in Michigan. The Alliance’s primary educational missions include undergraduate medical education (third and fourth year medical students), residency training and continuing medical education for all Saginaw physicians.
Synergy Medical provides administrative offices for all teaching programs including community-based, fully-accredited residency training programs in emergency medicine, family medicine, internal medicine, general surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology.
Customer Challenges
For the 252 employees who worked at the Synergy Alliance, the IT team had established 11 Dell Servers and an IBM server, managing 1.5 terabytes of direct attached storage. Symantec backup exec 11d with a Dell LTO direct attached drive is used for most of the backups daily. Tapes were also taken offsite for disaster recovery on a monthly basis.
The corporate file server, an aging Dell Windows 2000 server, hosted shared files like Word, Excel, and PDF for each department and the employees’ home directories. The server also included an internal/direct attached LTO tape drive for backups for most of the data in the server. This server and the tape drive’s warranty were ending very soon. The server was running a very old version of Backup Exec 8.6 to back up the local files.
The corporate server was also running out of disk space and was already at 95% utilization. This caused shared files to be scattered among a number of other servers. For instance, shared files were also stored in an accounting server; a Windows 2003 file server, and on a web server alongside the corporate server. Scattered storage made both management and backup difficult.
The Exchange server was backed up to tapes only once in a day, so restores resulted in 24 hour old data. Additionally when an end-user lost some messages in his or her mailbox, there was never enough space on the storage device to restore the exchange mail box.
Solution: StoreVault S500
J.D. McBrayer VP Finance and Jim Wegner Manager of IT, at Synergy Medical, decided that they required a NAS/SAN device to resolve current issues. When Netsource one recommended StoreVault, Jim was impressed by the fact that many other companies adopted StoreVault to address similar issues. Jim had talked to Equallogic and Dell/EMC prior to StoreVault and found that StoreVault provided a better solution at a better business price point.
Jim now runs 2 StoreVaults with 6 drives and a SCSI card. The two StoreVaults are in different locations – one at the company main office and another at the branch office. They were purchased with exactly same options.
All scattered user data is now consolidated in two different StoreVaults depending on the users’ location. Most of the corporate files are now stored on one of the StoreVaults on CIFS volumes at the main office while the rest are at the branch office. The files are snapshot every two hours and replicated to the other office nightly.
The main office StoreVault is also used for disk-to-disk backup of the Exchange Server over 400GB iSCSI LUNs. The backup server is loaded with Backup Exec 11d and CDP software for backing up the mail server every 3 hours. Tape backups still happen once a day for disaster recovery. With StoreVault, backup is realtime.
The Exchange Server data still resides on DAS which will be moved to StoreVault after upgrading to Exchange 2007. Jim is also thinking of buying an HP server with almost no DAS in the future, further reducing the investment in server and storage. Tape backups of the data on the StoreVault will discontinue once all the data starts to replicate.
Customer Experience
Jim says “StoreVault works great. We were really happy because it is easy.” He further adds “Installation was a piece of cake - taking only about 30 minutes to install the system”.
Jim is extremely happy with his VAR Netsource one. He says that the VAR was instrumental in setting up and configuring the first server to use an iSCSI LUN on a dedicated VLAN.
Customer Benefits
With StoreVault’s snapshot capability, it is possible to backup multiple times a day and restore the files in seconds. The StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture and Flexvol technology helps in easy addition and allocation of storage on the fly, making consolidated storage a reality for Synergy Medical. This has made restoring individual mail boxes a breeze and end users are receiving improved customer service.
Additionally, replication has helped in reducing the security risk associated with sending tapes offsite. StoreVault keeps Synergy Medical’s data healthy, while they do the same for their community.
