CASE STUDY
2020 , the healthcare provider immediately contacted the trusted experts in solving complex challenges .
About Sky Lakes Medical Center
Sky Lakes Medical Center is a not-for-profit , community-owned , internationally accredited acute-care teaching hospital dedicated to the people it serves . Sky Lakes serves more than 80,000 people in Klamath and Lake counties in south-central Oregon , and Modoc and Siskiyou counties in northern California .
After Cisco ’ s recommendation and seeing it perform , Sky Lakes purchased and quickly set up Cohesity to manage backup and unstructured data while continuing to use Cisco HyperFlex for primary ( latencysensitive ) data on Cisco Unified Computing System ( UCS ) servers with Cisco Intersight as the single management user interface for both . Sky Lakes was among the first to test and deploy the validated Cisco- Cohesity 40G design .
Solution
Cohesity software on Cisco UCS for data management was far easier for Sky Lakes to deploy and use than its prior legacy product . Cisco Intersight reduces IT operations time and allows oversight of the entire infrastructure , including Cisco HyperFlex and Cohesity certified Cisco UCS nodes .
IS no longer has to manually add servers to the backup queue because Cohesity automatically detects and protects each virtual machine ( VMs ) and workload while enabling Sky Lakes IT to tag only those it does not want to have backed up . This eliminated the need for IS staff to scramble to do a restore data .
Together , CDW , Cohesity and Cisco served as a rapid response data management team for Sky Lakes as it defended its data against ransomware .
Cohesity immutable backup snapshots , DataLock and other built-in protections that deter , detect and rapidly recover data at scale from a ransomware attack empowered IS to say no to the cybercriminal ’ s demands .
Sam Stewart , Sky Lakes Network Systems Analyst , said : “ Our organization suffered a critical ransomware attack , effectively crippling our entire infrastructure . With Cohesity , we ’ ve been able to recover machines and file shares , verify they ’ re clean and bring the applications back online .
“ Cohesity has literally saved us hundreds of hours of work and I ’ d say it prevented us from having to actually pay the ransom note . We all still have jobs and the community has a functional hospital because we have had so much success with Cohesity .”
Among the keys to recovery were CDW ’ s depth of experience quarterbacking partner teams for successful outcomes and the power of the Cohesity- Cisco solution . Cohesity was able to give IS staff access to a granular version of the organization ’ s Active Directory database . And Cohesity-Cisco solution ’ s fast , simple data restores enabled patients that regularly rely on the Sky Lakes Cancer Treatment Center to continue their treatments without being sent elsewhere and inconvenienced .
“ In this case , it ’ s not an exaggeration to say that Cohesity saved lives ,” explains Nick Fossen , Manager of Technology Solutions at Sky Lakes .
Sky Lakes sees tremendous value in the Cohesity multi-cloud data platform because it supports multiple data services . In addition to modern backup , Sky Lakes relies on Cohesity SmartFiles , a software defined solution for file and object services that goes beyond traditional scale-out NAS within the same cluster .
Complementary to Cisco HyperFlex , SmartFiles lowers Sky Lakes PACS total cost of ownership ( TCO ) by using Cisco HyperFlex as a cache tier for radiology images and Cohesity cluster as an archive tier . As a result , Sky Lakes no longer uses more costly primary storage for PACS archives . IS expects to use the same configuration for camera systems .
When Sky Lakes was unexpectedly targeted and breached by a massive ransomware attack in October
Sky Lakes was also able to instantly restore its file services because of Cohesity ’ s unique Cohesity SmartFiles capability , which supports SMB , NFS and S3 Object . Moreover , Sky Lakes was able to instantly clone the last good backup of its NAS shares and serve those files directly from the Cohesity cluster – recovering the service to users without the need to move data .
Cohesity works hours faster than the traditional products that Sky Lakes used for backups . Before the attack , for example , a PACS vendor corrupted an SQL database at 6:30 p . m . and contacted an engineer who was able to quickly log into Cohesity remotely , discover the last fully hydrated backup from 30 minutes prior , and completely restore the entire database in two minutes and 40 seconds .
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