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Written by doctors, for doctors." This was the phrase coined by Dr. Peter Sowerby and Dr. David Stables when they first wrote their software for a solution to improve patient care in general practitioners' surgeries. Over 20 years later, Egton Medical Information Systems Ltd (EMIS) is a leading primary care software provider, with more than 39 million patient records entrusted to its systems and more than 50 per cent of practices across the UK now relying on the technology.

Success has brought rewards and challenges in equal measure. The original on-premise EMIS LV and PCS (Primary Care System) solutions have flourished, providing GPs and their administrative staff with quick and easy access to appointments, medical records, and formulary management. More recently a multi-tenant cloud-based solution has been added to the portfolio- EMIS Web-allowing primary, secondary and community healthcare practitioners to view, share and contribute to a patient's cradle-to-grave healthcare record.

The cloud-based solution is transforming the way patient records and other medical data is stored. "We completed accreditation of the hosted EMIS Web solution in September 2010 and since then we have experienced strong demand for the service from GPs" says Mike Marchant, Data Centre Manager for EMIS's Hosted Services. "Medical records need to be reliably backed up and restored-without duplicating data. MRIs, CAT scans, and other images also need be securely scanned, stored, and preserved. The hosted model means that growing volumes of patient data can easily be shared by providers, systems and servers."

With high adoption rates and the new Web offering, EMIS is facing massively growing demand for its services and needs to protect the surrounding patient medical and administrative data. It has strict service level agreements (SLAs) with its customers and any failure to meet them, either in terms of an unplanned service outage or loss of data, could have serious consequences. Moreover, as part of the National Health Service 'Connecting for Health' strategy, EMIS has to adhere to rigorous compliance guidelines, both in terms of the way data is stored and the period of time it needs to be stored.

EMIS has been a long-term Quantum customer, having originally deployed a Quantum Scalar tape library several years ago. Faced with burgeoning demand for its services-the Axiom primary storage platforms now hold up to 800 terabytes of data-and the demand for faster and faster delivery of patient data, EMIS upgraded to a Quantum disk-based backup solution. "We wanted it all: robust data protection, ultra fast disk-to-disk performance, scalability, replication, and ease of use," said Marchant. "The Quantum DXi6700 disk backup appliance answered all of those needs. Over the years we had been impressed with the quality of support and service from Quantum and knew it was a great team to work with."

Working closely with its systems integration partner CMS Peripherals, EMIS deployed DXi6700 appliances in two data centres. Integrating directly into EMIS's Fibre Channel backup environment, the appliances provide an easily-shared backup and restore resource for Symantec NetBackup using a simple Fibre Channel VTL interface. Two Quantum Scalar i500 intelligent tape libraries (15 drives each) complete the picture, offering seamlessly integrated disk-to-disk-to-tape protection and vaulting off-site.

SHOWCASE DEDUPE AND REPLICATION
According to Marchant, one of the key advantages of the DXi appliances has been the embedded deduplication: "The GPs are regularly scanning files or adding images, which are attached to the medical record and included in the data store" he says. "This data doesn't change. Using the deduplication functionality, we only back up the changed data, and this has reduced the size of our backups by up to 80 percent. The store would typically be 30TB, but using the integrated deduplication in the Quantum DXi6700 appliance, we have reduced the backup to 5TB. The backup window has shrunk commensurately too. We have not measured the physical cost saving, but there's no doubt we are avoiding a significant amount of storage costs using the Quantum solution."

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