CASE STUDY
oOverview
Methodist Health System is among the
forward-looking healthcare providers
modernizing IT infrastructure in order to
boost cost predictability and efficiency
to optimize resources. Methodist system
professions wanted to break out of the
cycle of forklift operations.
So, the health network deployed the
jointly developed Cohesity on Cisco
Unified Computing System (UCS) data
management solution for modern backup
as well as Disaster Recovery (DR) to take
advantage of more granular reporting,
scale-out architecture and fast restores.
Challenges
The legacy backup and recovery solution
at Methodist had inertia. It had been in
production for nearly seven years and
although there were some issues, the team
had not seriously considered a replacement
until it faced increasing scalability
constraints and another disruptive,
potentially expensive upgrade.
“Our upcoming renewal was a good, natural
time to look at what was new in the market
and our management team was open to
modern technology,” according to Kevin
Rue, Senior Systems Engineer at Methodist
Health System. Because healthcare is a costconscious
industry, “we liked the idea of a
solution that would enable us to show costs
for years five, six and seven upfront, which is
easier for finance and legal.”
Methodist conducted a 60-day proof
of concept, standing up a new, parallel
environment running jointly offered
Cohesity data management software on
Cisco UCS. The incremental migration of
SQL and Microsoft Exchange workloads
allowed IT staff to evaluate how a
full production workload protection
would perform.
Solution
Today, Methodist manages two data
centers – one production, the other DR
– both running Cohesity DataPlatform
and Cohesity DataProtect on certified
Cisco UCS C240 M5 nodes. Non-latency
sensitive data is backed up and recovered
in the production site with bi-directional
replication to the DR site.
The joint solution simplifies management
with a single, HTML5-based user interface
(UI) that is easy to use and navigate.
Unlike siloed, legacy infrastructure, the
consolidated platform features fast ingest
and non-disruptive upgrades as well as
true global deduplication and impressive
storage efficiency.
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