The IT department at PinnacleHealth in Harrisburg, Pa., operates more than 300 servers, ensuring that applications are continuously available for 5,000 employees. But backing up eight terabytes of data daily and weekly was a slow process, tape expenses were increasing and recovering data was time-consuming and not always successful, writes IT network analyst Chris Mohr. "We needed a more efficient system and decided to look at other industry solutions. We had already invested in other storage infrastructure technology, but didn't like the all-in-one nature of that approach, which was also cost-prohibitive. We wanted a solution that would work with our existing storage infrastructure so we could avoid purchasing new infrastructure and training staff on new equipment," Mohr writes on our Hospital Impact blog. PinnacleHealth ultimately chose a "virtual tape library" with deduplication capabilities, allowing the health system to use existing storage resources while still improving backup and disaster recovery. "What's more, with the added benefit of deduplication, we have greatly increased our storage efficiency. By identifying and eliminating redundant information stored across the server, we have reduced our data footprint and cut the amount of data we needed to save by close to half," Mohr says. Hospital Impact