Double-Take ensures service continuity at the North Paris Radiology Centre
“Losing an entire day's patient data is a disaster. If the radiology department is out of action, even if it's only for one day, the result is confusion and suffering for patients who need to be transferred to other nearby hospitals for treatment. There's a secondary impact as patients who experience problems will prefer to use another radiology service in the future” explains Stéphane Ginocchio, director of Groupe SG Prod Médilan, responsible for the Double-Take deployment in the radiology department.
The situation was urgent. Following the disk crash, the radiology department's server was out of service for several days. Patient data couldn't be entered, with the risk of later billing problems. Image archiving, a legal requirement, was impacted. And the bill for the specialists called in to recover the data from the damaged disks came to €5000. All in all an expensive operation to recover less than a day's data, the last backup having been completed overnight.
The radiology department was following standard backup practices for this type of activity, with a single daily backup to an on-site RAID-based NAS and an additional off-site backup. French law requires radiology clinics to archive data for 30 years, a requirement which is only possible with rigorous backup procedures.
The data was protected, but not the server
In between backups, however, the server was unprotected. “If the server is unavailable, the radiology service can't register patients or tag images with patient details for archiving” says Stéphane Ginocchio.
It was in this context that SG Prod suggested using the Double-Take solution to migrate data from the old, failing server to a new server. Before choosing Double-Take SG Prod tested other, similar solutions, but none met the precise needs of radiological data conservation. The Double-Take solution beat the competition with its ease of use, but also its excellent quality/price ratio.
Switchover in just four minutes
Because Double-Take is not hardware dependent, migration from the old server to the new was problem-free. Unlike previous migrations, the server didn't need to be taken offline for a day or more. As Stéphane Ginnochio tells it, “Double-Take allowed us to replicate the data without impacting productivity. The radiology department was able to maintain service levels without interruption. After three days of synchronisation, we brought down the old server. Four minutes later the new machine was up and running with all data and an absolutely identical logical architecture.”
The old server was then reformatted to operate as a backup server. For the radiology department, the return on investment is obvious. Two Double-Take licences at €12,000 to ensure server continuity is nothing compared with the productivity impact of a week without a server and a €5000 bill for data recovery. SG Prod expects to use Double-Take® Move for future migration operations, and will be offering Double-Take to all its clients to to deliver the resilience necessary for their business activities. A solution similar to the Sarcelles Hospital deployment has already been installed at a second hospital (Hôpital Privé d'Antony) in the Paris region.
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SGPROD
Founded in 1997, SGProd is the leading specialist in the maintenance and security of private radiology clinics in the northern half of France, with over 250 customers and a contract renewal rate of over 98% over the last five years. Partnerships with two major radiology clinic software vendors. Turnover grew 62% in 2008, 28% in Q1 2009 for server security and resilience activities. HQ: 3 ter rue de Paris, 95440 Ecouen (France). Acknowledgements: Dr Robert Lavayssiere, Centre d’Imagerie Paris-Nord, 95200 Sarcelles; Dr Pierre Gignier, Hôpital Privé, 92160 Antony; Mr Geoffrey Lemoine, Project Manager “Résilience®”, Groupe SGPROD MédiLAN.
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