Polish Hospital Protects Critical Patient Data with NAKIVO

Business Challenge

Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital in Warsaw (formerly St. Stanislaw Hospital) is the oldest medical institution for infectious diseases. It was established by the decree of Tsar Nicholas in 1881, to combat dangerous epidemics. Currently, the hospital is the leading health care center in the field of infectious diseases in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe. The hospital performs tasks on three levels: providing patients with high-quality medical services, infectious diseases prevention and medical staff training.

The hospital’s IT infrastructure consists of one site and six physical servers, where three of servers are virtualized on VMware vSphere and two on Microsoft Hyper-V. In total, the hospital has 20 virtual machines that store a web server, an applications server, a hospital information system, an enterprise resource planning system, a Microsoft Active Directory server, a picture archiving and communication system and an Oracle database. All data stored at the hospital is critical. Patient data, including medical history, is updated every few minutes. In the event of an emergency, it is vital to recover the most recent drug administration history in order to avoid overdosing or incompatibility of drugs. When IT systems are not available, the hospital cannot take new patients, plan treatments or dose drugs. This is why a reliable VM backup solution is critical to support the hospital’s daily operations.

Previously, the hospital only backed up its Oracle database. If, for example, an applications server crashed, the IT team had to install a new one and configure it from scratch. Basically, the hospital could not back up an entire virtual machine. The backup of the Oracle database itself required a significant amount of time, and recovery was even more time-consuming. After virtualizing two of its servers on Microsoft Hyper-V, NAKIVO Backup & Replication was recommended to the Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw by a solution partner.

Solution

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is designed specifically for virtualized environments and supports both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is reliable, easier to use than the competition, and has a great price-performance ratio. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the hospital now ensures that all its virtual machines are available around the clock in order to provide optimal patient care. Moreover, the simplicity of the software allows the IT team to save significant amount of time on administration.

“NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a simple and an intuitive solution. The dashboard offers great visibility, as all alarms are visible immediately after logging in, and the web interface allows you to use the product anywhere, without the need of installing a client. That is handy when you use an Apple MacBook,” says Krzysztof Plochocki, IT Manager at Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers consistent, image-based backups, ensuring that data in applications remains consistent and ready for recovery. In addition, the solution provides incremental backups, where only changes are copied to the backup repository, resulting in faster backups. Moreover, with instant VM recovery, entire virtual machines can be recovered within minutes. “An initial full backup of our entire infrastructure takes 3 to 4 hours. With incremental backup and because our environment is based on SSDs, the backup jobs complete in a few minutes. We enjoy that we can schedule and structure our backup jobs to ensure the shortest backup windows possible. For example, we back up our accounting server incrementally every day, and, once a week, we do a full backup. While with our hospital information system, we need incremental backups every 8 hours and a full backup every day,” explains Krzysztof.

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the hospital set up automated backups to cloud, making the whole backup process fully automatic. The hospital has integration with the encrypted cloud storage UseCrypt Safe, and all the backups are automatically sent to the cloud. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows us to choose UseCrypt Safe as cloud backup storage. In Poland, it is the only encrypted cloud service that is recommended by the Polish government,” says Krzysztof.

Results

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital of Warsaw protects its critical data and applications. With a reliable data protection solution from NAKIVO, the hospital ensures optimal patient care by making all IT systems always available. The solution allows the hospital to perform full and incremental backups and to send backups automatically to the cloud. With instant VM recovery, the hospital can recover entire VMs instantaneously. “Previously, we could not back up an entire virtual machine. Recovery of a database from a backup was time-consuming, and the failure of the application server required a new installation. Currently, with just one click, we can recover an entire virtual machine back to any day or time. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we save a tremendous amount of time on administration and increase overall reliability as well,” says Krzysztof.

About Regional Infectious Diseases Hospital

In 1881, the Warsaw City Council adopted a resolution to build a separate hospital for infectious diseases in order to protect the population from acute diseases spreading at that time. In 1882, the construction of the hospital was completed and the hospital opened. In 1982, the hospital celebrated its 100th anniversary. At that time, the most frequently treated diseases at the hospital were meningitis, food poisoning, and mononucleosis. Currently, the hospital treats patients with COVID-19. For more information, visit zakazny.pl.