HIPAA News

Overland Storage Aids Primary Care Provider in Safeguarding Electronic Medical Records with REO and NEO Tiered Data Protection

(Feb 04, 2008)-- Overland Storage, announced that Graybill Medical Group has deployed the REO 9100 disk-based backup, recovery and virtual tape library (VTL) appliance as well as the NEO 2000 scalable tape library. Overland’s tiered data protection offerings are the foundation of a highly reliable and scalable disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backup and recovery solution that has reduced Graybill’s backup window by 50 percent while lowering administrative overhead from seven hours a week to less than one hour.

For more than 75 years, Graybill Medical Group has been providing responsive, top-quality patient care to families in the Escondido, Calif., area. As the largest primary care medical group in the vicinity, Graybill accommodates more than 129,000 office visits annually at its three locations. As one of the most technically advanced healthcare facilities in southern California, Graybill embraced a leading-edge electronic medical records (EMR) solution as part of a decision to migrate to a paperless environment.

According to Forest Hudson, information systems manager at Graybill Medical Group, the EMR system had an immediate impact on the group’s technology foundation, with storage doubling over a three-to-six month period. Additionally, the group’s requirements for protecting the influx of medical records rose dramatically, creating expanded backup requirements. Full nightly backups became arduous and time consuming, often exceeding the allowable backup window while also requiring manual intervention to swap out tapes.

To keep pace with ever-increasing backup requirements, Graybill sought a complementary disk- and tape-based solution, ultimately choosing Overland’s REO 9100 disk-based appliance and NEO 2000 tape library. “REO’s ‘set it and forget it’ operation means less time working on backups while NEO gives us an eight-fold capacity increase to scale our data archive as needed,” says Hudson. “Overland’s tiered disk and tape data protection blends best-of-class features, automation and performance to match our continuing focus on world-class patient care.”

In October 2007, Graybill Medical Group shut down several of its offices when wildfires raging throughout San Diego’s North County forced widespread evacuation. Fortunately, Overland’s tiered backup approach provided an additional layer of protection as an employee was able to take a full backup to an offsite disaster recovery location while remaining backups were performed automatically, without requiring manual intervention. In the near future, Graybill will undergo a full-scale deployment of an all-digital Picture Archiving Communications System (PACS), which will be easily accommodated by its existing Overland REO and NEO data protection foundation.

According to Vern LoForti, president and CEO of Overland Storage, the company’s tiered data protection strategy is designed to deliver optimized solutions, giving customers the flexibility to choose the most appropriate combination of disk and tape appliances to meet their backup, near-line archive and long-term data retention requirements. “Our objective is to offer the broadest array of versatile disk and expandable tape products, so customers can deploy a tiered platform that meets all their requirements in terms of capacity, performance and price per terabyte.”

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