Témoignage Client : Goold Health Systems

Company Background

Goold Health Systems, headquartered in Augusta, Maine, is a nationwide healthcare management organization specializing in pharmacy benefit services, clinical services, and secure data and storage services. Goold Health Systems (GHS) focuses exclusively on Medicaid management to customers including State Medicaid agencies, the Federal Government, private sector companies, and non-profit organizations. Founded in 1974, GHS has earned a reputation as a national leader in Medicaid health care management, data processing, and administration.

Challenges

As GHS continued to grow, so did the volumes of data required to be backed up. Weekly backup jobs, consisting of millions of small files, grew to exceed five (5) days, making daily incremental backups impossible. Data was accumulating during the work week and changes were not captured quickly enough to be part of the secondary offsite backup so these changes had to wait until the next job began.

Furthermore, all GHS backups needed to be backed up to disk and archived offsite indefinitely to tape. This requirement was made more complex because contractual commitments required GHS to run a separate backup job per customer, greatly increasing the complexity of the backup process.

Another requirement for GHS was to find a solution that could accommodate their Linux based infrastructure. They primarily use Red Hat systems for which their current solution had very poor support. Frequently, their backups would finish with exceptions—but no detailed error messages—leaving the IT administrator questioning what went wrong.

The goal for the new solution was to dramatically accelerate both full and incremental backups, to gain more reliable support for their Linux environment, and to increase overall usability.

Solution

GHS selected Arkeia Network Backup software with 200 flows, with 50 Linux and Windows Agents, two MySQL Agents, one 10 TB virtual tape library (VTL), Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape software and a 4 drive Dell PowerEdge 2950 LTO-4 tape library, and they selected Bronze-level Maintenance Support program.

Results

Upon installation of the Arkeia Software solution, GHS saw improvements immediately. Full backups were able to complete in less than a day, allowing incremental backups to run successfully. As a result, additional data could be backed up in less time.

“With Arkeia’s multiflow technology, we were able to see improvements in speed across the board, saving me time and allowing us to backup more data in less time than before,” stated Brian Butterfield, Linux System Administrator, Goold Health Systems. The flexibility of Arkeia Network Backup gives GHS the best of both worlds: the ability to backup millions of small files on a single server and the ability to backup large files on many servers. As a result, GHS enjoys the piece-of-mind of knowing all files are backed up in a timely fashion, regardless of location or size.

Another key factor in selecting Arkeia Software was the deep support for Linux. The GHS infrastructure runs primarily on Linux systems such as Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora, CentOS and used MySQL databases. “Other vendors state that they support Linux, however Arkeia has actual Linux clients that can handle special attributes of Linux, like Linux file systems, such as Proc,” said Butterfield.

Unlike its predecessor, Arkeia’s software was easy to deploy and manage. Features such as automated disk-to-disk-to-tape chaining and GUI based excludes and includes, saved administrative time and effort. Furthermore, Arkeia’s Wiki Guide provided on-line detailed technical documentation that was quick and easy to access.

“The Technical Support team has been great in resolving or responding quickly to problems that have occurred,” stated Butterfield. “I felt like my suggestions were addressed rather than just falling on deaf ears.”

Today, GHS uses Arkeia to deliver best-in-class data protection with fast, reliable and redundant backups.