Quantum DXi for Fast, Secure Data Protection – Last week was fun and exciting here at Quantum with news breaking out about our latest feature rich software release for DXi backup appliances. You may The Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS trust delivers mental health services to over a million people in the British midlands. Its IT systems manage everything from physician and patient records to scheduling, clinical databases, and the infrastructure allowing staff and patients to communicate.
Fast Growing Critical Data Based on Increasing Virtualisation
“The amount of data that we manage is substantial and growing very fast,” explains Stuart Harwood, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Coventry and Warwickshire IT Collaborative, the organisation that provides the Trust’s IT services. “Today, we have a full 10 TB of file storage and 15 TB of email. Most of our infrastructure is now virtualised, and we manage over 300 VMs, with plans to increase that over time. One of our most important challenges is how to backup and protect that data.”
Quantum DXi for Fast, Secure Data Protection – Changing Backup Tools to Keep up With Data Growth
The Trust IT team has evolved its data protection over a decade. It began with Backup Exec and tape libraries but as virtualization grew, it added Veeam software and worked with reseller Proact to select the right disk-based backup.
Quantum DXi for Fast, Secure Data Protection – Proact recommended Quantum deduplication appliances. “Our Quantum DXi4700s were reliable, easily scalable, had extremely good deduplication, and they could support both our Backup Exec and Veeam backup jobs in the same appliances,” Harwood said. The team installed a Quantum appliance in each of the Trust’s two data centers and ran all backups to them.
Growing Data Overwhelms Existing Solutions
The system worked well but couldn’t keep up with the growth in data and VMs. “There was too much traffic, too much data – we started to have trouble getting backups completed during the allotted time with restores taking longer as well,” Harwood remembers.