Pederzoli Hospital realizes 35% TCO reduction and superior compliance

Pederzoli Hospital is a multisite hospital with more than 42,000 emergency room visits per year. Every day it provides 2,900 outpatient services and 68 surgeries, equating to around 1 million outpatient services and 18,000 surgeries per year. Hospital administration is demanding and complex, and there are stringent data protection compliance requirements, as well as the need for clinical staff to access patient records and other information quickly.

On top of superior backup and recovery, we also have greater assurance with Cohesity against ransomware and increased security to meet compliance requirements at Pederzoli.

Francesco Corba Colombo

IT Infrastructure Manager, Ospedale Pederzoli

The Challenge

The hospital system has around 2,500 users, including clinical staff such as doctors and nurses, researchers, logistics managers, and administrators and facilities teams. A multisite facility spread across five different locations, the sites are served by two data centres which were, before the switch to Cohesity, managing more than 160 TB of data.

The server environment included a virtualised environment based on VMware vSphere, Windows and Linux virtual machines, virtual appliances, Microsoft SQL, Oracle and other databases, and a network-attached storage (NAS) system for file storage. The increased use of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) technology, which is used to securely store and share electronic images and reports, demands significant storage capacity, with many terabytes of data added every year. Even not taking PACS growth into account, the hospital is experiencing overall annual data growth of 5-10%.

The hospital was looking for a new solution to meet a number of pressing needs, including providing a simplified data management platform, elimination of backup, archive, and file sharing silos, and faster search and retrieval of documents. In addition, Pederzoli required a Write Once, Read Many times (WORM) solution for PACS, medical data archiving, and improved backup and restore, including disaster recovery and protection against malware such as ransomware attacks.

Any new solution would need to ensure regulatory compliance and data security. Alongside meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it would need to ensure compliance for specific health-related regulations. In the case of Pederzoli Hospital, as with others in Italy, medical records and reports must be kept indefinitely—both because they are legal proof, and because they are used for historical health research. Diagnostic documentation must be retained for at least 20 years. Because of these mandates, Pederzoli Hospital was looking for efficient data storage capacity, superior archive and backup, and excellent high-speed data search and retrieval capabilities.

The Solution

Cohesity has a long history of collaboration with Cisco, a key technology provider and trusted advisor to Pederzoli Hospital. Cisco made an introduction and while Veeam and NetApp were also under consideration, Pederzoli initiated a Proof of Concept (PoC) with Cohesity. “Within just a couple of hours into the PoC, it became clear to our team that Cohesity was a game changer and the best solution moving forward. The combination of Cisco and Cohesity was hard to beat,” said Colombo.

Pederzoli has now implemented Cohesity across four clusters with Cisco UCS C220 M5 and integrated with Cisco Intersight and Cisco SecureX. This is a secure, web-scale solution and is validated by Cisco Validated Design. It integrates seamlessly with existing VMware, Windows, Linux, SQL, and Oracle technologies, while providing faster search and retrieval, ease-of-use for the IT team, high-performance backup and restore, as well as significant reductions in data storage requirements. “With Cisco Validated Design and Cisco Intersight,we achieved fast, reliable, and predictable deployment as well as simplified configuration, maintenance, and support services for Cohesity on Cisco UCS. Also, given our increasing need for anti-ransomware protection, as well as simplified discovery, investigation, and recovery from ransomware attacks, Cohesity-SecureX integration provided us not only peace of mind, but also expanded IT-SecOps collaboration to effectively combat ransomware,” said Colombo.

Following the initial implementation, Pederzoli Hospital intends to implement disaster recovery options—leveraging anti-ransomware protection measures, such as Cohesity DataLock for advanced protection both in the cloud and on-prem.

The Results

Thanks to Cohesity, Pederzoli Hospital has modernised many of its everyday data management practices, is able to complete backup and recovery operations more quickly, has improved archiving and retrieval solutions, and can satisfy the demands of clinical staff for agile data access. Compared to its previous legacy environment, Cohesity achieves 5x the deduplication and compression, creating optimal backup target storage efficiency and lowering costs.

The time taken to do a full backup has been reduced by 50-70%, and for incremental backups the reduction is just over 50%. The addition of source-side deduplication, which is not always available in backup solutions, has greatly enhanced confidence in the overall backup process. Recovery time is reduced from days to minutes, and depending on the type of data being retrieved, is down to seconds. Colombu adds, “For example, before the Cohesity implementation, searching across all backup data for a single file might take 20 minutes. Now the same search is completed in a few seconds. This translates to increased speeds and a savings of several hours of staff time each week, which is a tremendous gain for our IT team.”