Veeam helps Hadassah Medical Center protect life-saving medical systems

The Business Challenge

For more than 100 years, Hadassah Medical Center has been the leader in medicine and nursing in Israel, laying the foundation and setting standards for the country’s modern healthcare system. Hadassah developed Israel’s community health services, established the first modern hospital as well as medical and nursing schools, and set the framework for medical research.

Most medical breakthroughs in Israel have taken place at Hadassah, including the first successful heart transplant, the first robotic surgery and the world’s first computer-assisted hip replacement surgery. Hadassah is well-known for instituting and implementing “the medicine of tomorrow” by incorporating advanced solutions with personalized treatment.

To achieve this level of excellence, patients’ electronic medical records, medical imaging systems like CT, MRI and ultrasound, robotic and computerassisted surgical tools and clinical research must be available around the clock. The challenge they faced were their legacy backup solution, Veritas NetBackup. Recovering the legacy servers that supported these critical systems was unreliable, complicated and time-consuming, which threatened the availability of these critical resources.

“If we can’t recover servers quickly and reliably, we’re in crisis,” said Eldad Sarel, IT infrastructure manager at Hadassah Medical Center. “We have to make sure every system required to treat patients is available all the time.”

Sarel said legacy backup was so complex and difficult to use that just one person on the IT team spent the entire week managing backup and recovery when they could have focused on other IT priorities, like testing Hadassah’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy.

“We needed to replace legacy backup with a fast, easy and reliable solution,” he said. “We learned quickly there was only one suitable choice.”

The Veeam Solution

Hadassah Medical Center replaced Veritas NetBackup with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam provides non-stop availability of critical medical systems that is required by healthcare professionals to treat patients. It recovers system-supporting servers 99% faster, taking minutes not hours. Veeam also provides functionality that’s not possible with legacy backup. This includes the ability to verify recoverability — an important component of every hospital’s BCDR strategy.

“Veeam is amazing,” Sarel said. “It’s simple to use yet robust and reliable, giving us confidence that doctors and nurses have access to medical systems they need to treat patients, whether they’re in the emergency room or the operating theater.”

The operating theater is where medicine meets machinery, and Veeam plays a role in this too. Veeam backs up and replicates 300 TB across 800 virtual servers on-premises, and some of those servers support robotic and computer-assisted surgical systems. If someone falls on a wet sidewalk, suffers complications from a car accident or complains of persistent lower back pain from long-distance running, Hadassah’s orthopedic surgeons can help. They combine robotic surgery with advanced three-dimensional imaging to repair fractured sacral bones.

Veeam protects servers that support clinical research too. Hadassah is internationally recognized for decades of leadership in stem cell research and for immunotherapies that support the body’s own resources to fight disease. Hadassah has seen stunning results from the clinical trials for potential treatments of ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases. Hadassah’s sophisticated, visionary medical research is leading the way to a better quality of life for people around the globe, and Veeam plays a small but vital part by increasing recovery speed of the servers supporting clinical research by 99%. Recovering those same servers with legacy backup sometimes took hours.

Veeam also decreases the backup management time by 88% (going from 40 hours each week to five), giving the IT team more time to test the organization’s BCDR strategy. Moreover, Veeam lets the team verify the recoverability of backups and replicas for the first time. Veeam DataLabs provides an isolated environment where the team tests backups for recoverability (SureBackup) and replicas for recoverability (SureReplica). The isolated environment also offers the On-Demand Sandbox so the team can test and troubleshoot software updates before deploying them in production.

“Veeam makes life in IT easier,” Sarel said. “Next, we’re going to use Veeam to simplify and speed up backup and recovery of NAS file shares. We know if we have questions, we can contact our account manager or Veeam’s technical team. Both provide excellent support.”

The Results

• Ensures nonstop availability of critical medical systems to healthcare professionals
  Veeam gives the IT team confidence that patients’ medical records, imaging systems, robotic and computer-assisted surgical tools and clinical research are always available to doctors and nurses, enabling them to provide patients with efficient and effective treatment any time of the day or night.
• Recovers servers supporting medical systems 99% faster, taking minutes instead of hours
  “We’re amazed by Veeam’s simplicity and speed,” Sarel said. “The ability to recover quickly and easily in a medical setting can’t be overstated.”
• Offers functionality not possible before, including verifying the recoverability of backups and replicas
  Veeam DataLabs let the IT team leverage backups and replicas like never before. Team members create safe, isolated spaces outside of the production environment to test recoverability (SureBackup and SureReplica). They also test software patches and updates with On-Demand Sandbox before committing them to production, saving countless headaches.