California Department of State Hospitals Attains Cloud Mobility and 160 Days of Added Productivity with Rubrik

75%

Reduction in data center footprint

67%

Management time savings

45%

TCO Savings

Overview

The California Department of State Hospitals (DSH) manages the state’s forensic mental health hospital system, providing in-patient mental health services to approximately 6,000 patients. DSH oversees five state hospitals located in Atascadero, Coalinga, Metropolitan (in Los Angeles County), Napa, and Patton. The department strives to provide effective treatment in a safe environment and in a fiscally responsible manner.

Andrew Hinkle, CTO, leads a 200-person IT team that supports over 10,000 employees. “IT serves a critical role in DSH’s ability to operate. Our organization is very data-driven, so our systems provide a vital resource that allows our clinicians and hospital executives to make informed decisions.”

“IT supplies the backend technology for our security systems, which are crucial for hospital safety. Over 90 percent of our patients are forensically committed, which results in a more precarious environment than your average hospital. As a result, ensuring our staff’s well being is a top priority,” said Hinkle, “Our IT team also supports patient data through various medical applications, so any downtime could directly lead to delays in treatment.”

“As a CTO, it’s my job to be strategic about the technologies we leverage,” said Hinkle. “Bringing in cutting-edge tools like Rubrik allows us to work smarter by automating manual tasks and reallocating time towards higher-value initiatives that move our organization forward.”

Bringing in cutting-edge tools like Rubrik allows us to work smarter by automating manual tasks and reallocating time towards higher-value initiatives that move our organization forward.

Andrew Hinkle
CTO

Featured Product: Rubrik Cloud Data Management

Challenges

Lengthy restores
Labor-intensive and time-consuming legacy solution

Results

Near-zero RTOs
67% management time savings
160 days of additional productivity back to the team per year (32 days per site)
45% TCO savings
75% reduction in data center footprint

Business Transformation

Increased operational efficiency, resulting in 160 days per year of added productivity
Automated recovery workflows, allowing the team to devote more time towards strategic, value-add initiatives

Challenges

Searching for a modern data management solution

“We nearly experienced a disaster due to issues with our legacy data management solution,” said Hinkle. “A few years ago, a massive wildfire in Napa came within a mile of our hospital and destroyed network connectivity. Unfortunately, we realized our backups had been turned off in order to conserve space, which meant we had no off-premises backups for recovery. Luckily, the worst did not come to pass, but this experience led us to focus more on disaster recovery going forward.”

“One of the deciding factors when selecting Rubrik was the seamless cloud integration,” said Saul Gonzalez, Enterprise Server Manager. “We saw this as a way to strengthen our disaster recovery strategy. Since adopting Rubrik, we protect our data on-premises and archive to a public cloud. The department also conducted a five-year TCO and found that we would see immediate cost savings and improved functionality by moving to Rubrik.”

A few years ago, a massive wildfire in Napa came within a mile of our hospital and destroyed network connectivity. Luckily, the worst did not come to pass, but this experience led us to focus more on disaster recovery going forward.”

Andrew Hinkle
CTO

Solutions

Rubrik enables department's "smart-cloud" strategy

“Previously, we archived our data between hospitals, meaning that each facility had an archival partner. This had been turned off prior to the wildfire, leaving us with no valid recovery method. With Rubrik’s seamless cloud integration, we are archiving all of our hospitals’ data in AWS S3 for long-term retention and are confident that we can recover critical data in case of a disaster,” said Gonzalez.

“The State of California has a cloud-first strategy. On top of that, our team believes in “smart cloud,” which is placing the right workloads in the right clouds. In addition to AWS, we are using Azure to manage Office365 and may evaluate GCP in the future. Rubrik’s cloud vendor-agnostic approach provides the flexibility for us to utilize the cloud solution that makes the most sense for each scenario,” added Hinkle.

Total hard savings before and after Rubrik

Rubrik has helped DSH reduce its TCO by 45%. “We have seen significant cost savings by switching to Rubrik,” said Hinkle.

With Rubrik’s seamless cloud integration, we are archiving all of our hospitals’ data in AWS S3 for long-term retention and are confident that we can recover critical data in case of a disaster.

Saul Gonzalez
Enterprise Server Manager

Featured: Amazon Web Services

The Results

DSH is using Rubrik to protect its heavily virtualized environment, including SQL and mission-critical security applications, including fire safety, hospital police, and alarm systems. Benefits include:

67% management time savings

“Previously, we only had one person at each site who knew how to use our legacy solution. We were also spending too much time babysitting backups. Fortunately, Rubrik is easy enough for anyone to use. We used to spend 90 minutes per site managing our daily backups, which has now been reduced to 30 minutes with Rubrik. This has resulted in 160 days of additional productivity per year (32 days per site)."

Near-zero RTOs

“Large restores used to take several hours to multiple days. We can now perform restores in minutes with Rubrik.”

75% reduction in data center footprint

“Rubrik allowed us to reduce our rack space from 8U to 2U per hospital.”

Streamlined compliance

“We need to meet FedRAMP certification, as well as maintaining sensitive PHI and PII data. We feel confident that Rubrik allows us to meet our compliance requirements.”