Daniel Belanger, Tech Manager at St. Tammany Parish Hospital, discusses how he saved his team hours a day and simplified data protection by switching to Rubrik.
What is the IT environment at St. Tammany?
The team supports over 2,700 employees and affiliate physicians, as well as all of their patients. Our hybrid cloud environment is 95% virtual, and we currently run around 220 production VMs that host everything from file shares to email to clinical applications.
What challenges were you experiencing with data protection?
As a healthcare organization, data protection is extremely important at St. Tammany. With our legacy solution, we suffered from constant job failures, complex management, and capacity issues. We had major performance issues with our backup software since it was impacting our domain controllers. So, we had to remove the virtual aspect and do a file-level restore of our virtual servers.
As a small IT team, we have a lot on our plate, and backups were consuming about 2 hours a day. It became too tedious to manage, so I began searching for alternative solutions.
How has Rubrik helped overcome these problems?
When I was researching alternatives, I wanted something that was simple. I needed a solution that anybody on my team could use since we function as a small, agile team of generalists.
Rubrik really delivers on simple data management in our hybrid cloud environment. We have gone from spending hours a day managing backups to literally just a few minutes a day.
Reliability is another huge benefit. There is a lot of value in knowing that our data is being backed up and can easily be restored with just a few click if needed. The time to recover takes as long as the time required by the OS to boot, which dramatically decreases our RTOs.
What types of applications are you using with Rubrik?
We are managing our electronic medical data with Rubrik. We also are running smaller clinical applications, such as cardiology, lab, and dietary apps.
What are the future IT goals that you hope to achieve with Rubrik?
Rubrik also allows us to unlock new use cases for our backup replicas. We now have the optionality of using our replica data to accelerate test and development for our DBAs. We have substantially cut down the time required to stand up a server for DBA usage from weeks to just hours. We’re aiming to grow this process and further utilize our replicas.
Another goal is to support the growing number of hospital partnerships and new physicians to manage. We must continue to absorb new apps and make them as manageable as possible. We now support over 600 VDI desktops that we have to run.
Our environment continues to expand while our IT staff headcount remains the same. We are confident that Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform can help us seamlessly evolve with the industry.
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