Leeds & Bradford Hospitals’ Pathology Service has revamped its data storage systems to meet the data demands caused by a merger of several separate hospitals in the area.

After the merger, the amount of data generated grew by a factor of three. Budgetary constraints made it impossible to backup each site’s data individually, so the Pathology group decided to backup centrally each day.

'The daily backup was starting to take five days — a situation that we knew could not carry on,' said Bruce Pickering small systems and networks manager. 'The tape drives were failing so often that the organisation had reached the point where we realistically could not backup data using tape.'

The prolonged time needed for backups put the hospital at risk of being unable to restore critical records in the event of a serious server failure.

The network traffic required to backup data centrally also detracted from the service for the hospital’s primary applications.

The service's new disk-to-disk backup system from vendor EVault provided a faster way to backup patient data with cheaper management overheads by eliminating the need for a dedicated team of IT staff to manage backups at the various hospital sites.

The Pathology Service plans to extend the system and add simultaneous backup at a second site.