^PDF

Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, Vocera develops a sleek and smart communications system with one thing in mind – improve the way medical teams communicate so that they, in turn, can take better care of their patients. Unlike typical pagers, which would take minutes to work, or cell phones, which would interfere with the hospital electronic equipment, the Vocera® communication device enables team members to have a nearly instant 1‐to‐1 conversation, saving communication steps, time, and most importantly, patient lives.

Hospitals especially benefit from using this simple device. They have come to rely on it at all times. To best serve users, Vocera knows they need continuous business operations – no matter what.

Vocera backs up 3TB of data including hundreds of thousands of customer communication logs, proprietary source code, company financials and business data for the purposes of recovery in the event of a disaster or outage. Without backup and the ability to recover their data and applications, they would not be able to support their customers and the people they serve. Since Vocera’s primary customers are hospitals, Vocera needs to provide support 24x7x365 without exception.

Prior to being a Simply Continuous customer, Vocera backed up to tape, which was stored offsite. A single IT staff person was dedicated to the tape backup process, which proved to be unreliable and prone to errors. Vocera documented several instances when the tape backup process broke down unbeknownst to IT. When the error was finally identified and fixed, Vocera was already into the next backup cycle.

Fixing the occasional backup error wasn’t the only issue, recovering the data added a whole other level of complexity to the job of keeping the business running. In a test exercise, it took more than 24 working hours and 3 people to recover the data. After re‐evaluating their processes and determining that they would not be able to improve their data recovery time with tape, Amy Karabinas, Vice President of Engineering and IT, made the decision to look into other recovery options.

Ms. Karabinas engaged with her IT services team from 4 Base Technologies to evaluate new technologies that would meet Vocera’s needs, including virtualization and deduplication. She quickly realized that she needed more than technology to solve her problems: she needed a trusted partner with the expertise and commitment to help her business recover in the event of a disaster. Amy’s team looked into various offsite data backup and recovery providers, including Seagate’s i365 EVault service, but quickly concluded that their service could not cost‐effectively scale to accommodate Vocera’s data set. With this realization, she turned to Simply Continuous to provide her with a scalable solution to meet her recovery needs as well as her budget.

To address Vocera’s need to recover both data and applications, Simply Continuous provided them with both the Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive™ services. The Data Recovery Vault service provides Vocera with enterprise‐class data backup protection and recovery. Vocera backs up locally to a Data Domain DD565 appliance and then replicates the data securely to a Simply Continuous datacenter, where it is stored on a sister Data Domain appliance. The service provides the added protection of continuous system and data monitoring to ensure that the data is readily available whenever Vocera needs it. When one of the data sensors goes off, an alert is quickly sent to Simply Continuous’ NOC so that they may address the complication.

"For customers who back up to a cloud or to tape, they don’t have the added benefit of being alerted when bad data has been copied or if there is a break in replication. In this type of scenario, companies are left vulnerable because they don’t often know that there’s been a break in the backup process UNTIL it comes time to recover. By that time, it’s too late,” says Chris Eidler, CTO and co‐founder of Simply Continuous. “With the Data Recovery Vault service, we’ve built in more than 1,300 sensors to actively monitor our customers’ data so that in the event they need to recover, they can do so easily."

In addition to backing up data with Data Recovery Vault, Vocera signed up for Simply Continuous’ AppAlive service. AppAlive enables Vocera to not only recover data but applications as well. "Virtualizing our servers was always on the IT roadmap. We wanted to do so to consolidate our servers as well as create copies in the event we needed to do a full blown recovery. Remote restoration of our virtual applications was a natural extension of our recovery plan and partnering with Simply Continuous allowed us to do so in a way that was cost‐effective and easy,” says Amy Karabinas. “The service effectively pays for itself within 18 months and puts us in a much better position to recover in a disaster. To have this recovery capability is unheard of for a company of our size and our budget."

Four months after a smooth implementation of Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive, Vocera’s dedicated backup personnel were able to be redeployed to other strategic initiatives. “Prior to Simply Continuous, we backed up 3TB of our most critical data. Due to Data Domain’s phenomenal deduplication rates we backup all 35TB of our raw data (3.2 dedupe data) including customer communication logs,” says Amy Karabinas. “These logs allow us to do the customer usage analysis and decision support we always wanted to do in order to make key improvements to our technology. Now that we have the service, not only are we doing the analysis, I have the resources available to FINALLY do the Exchange migration!"

• 35TB of data
• Primary datacenter located in California
• Tape storage
• Symantec Backup Exec
• Virtualized servers

• Technology

• Dependent on tedious and unreliable tape technology
• IT resources are reacting to tape failure vs. being proactive making IT improvements
• Slow recovery time
• Limited budget
• No secondary datacenter

• Simply Continuous Data Recovery Vault
• Simply Continuous AppAlive™

• Improved recovery time
• Reliable and flexible data recovery options
• Recovery of data and applications in same facility
• Data backup and protection without tape
• Subscription pricing
• Redeploy backup personnel to work on strategic IT projects
• 24x7 customer support

• Ongoing and cost‐efficient IT disaster recovery
• Improved RTO
• Eliminate tape backup
• Increased data storage capacity from 3TB to 35TB of data without increasing costs
• Freed up one staff member who previously worked entirely on operational backup and redeployed to work on other IT strategic initiatives