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Zmanda Open Source Backup, MySQL backup

Customer Success Story: Healthcare

Schryver Medical

Denver-based Schryver Medical, Inc. is the leader in healthcare products and services for long-term care facilities, hospitals, assisted-living centers and homecare patients throughout the western United States. The company has 650 employees who provide mobile imaging, laboratory, diagnostics, and medical waste disposal services across seven states.

Despite the economic downturn, Schryver Medical has been growing at a tremendous pace. Company executives expect the organization to exceed $100 million in overall revenue within the next 3 years. To accomplish these goals, Schryver Medical needs an enterprise-class IT infrastructure that can scale accordingly. For that reason, they have focused the back end of the enterprise on open-source based technologies. This includes everything from the security, VOIP, and CRM systems to backup and disaster recovery.

Employing this strategy is not necessarily as simple as it sounds, however. Healthcare organizations such as Schryver Medical have unique data protection requirements due to stringent HIPAA compliance regulations. All of the company's digital patient records such as PACS, EMR, billing and other critical systems must be backed up and secured in a manner that doesn't compromise patient privacy and regulatory compliance or it could be detrimental to the lifeblood of the organization.

Schryver Medical was using Symantec Backup Exec for its backup and recovery needs, but Johan Hybinette, the company's chief information security officer, became frustrated with the cookie-cutter nature of the solution, the steep licensing fees, the poor quality of customer support and the proprietary format in which his backup files were stored. Instead, he decided to switch to Zmanda's open source-based Amanda Enterprise to back up his mission critical systems and applications.

Amanda Enterprise has been rolled out in the company's Colorado facility and will be installed through the remainder of the organization and its mobile units by the third quarter of this year. Most of the company's 650 desktop computers and 100 servers are running on Windows, and its IT managers found the benefits of Amanda Enterprise, including the flexibility to run customized scripts and store their backup files in open formats, to be quite compelling.

The affordability of Amanda Enterprise was another differentiator that led to its adoption. Despite being relatively comparable enterprise-scale solutions with plugins for VMware and Microsoft Exchange, Hybinette estimates that the company is saving more than 50 percent with Amanda Enterprise compared to the cost of running comparable commercial solutions.

Hybinette was also particularly complimentary of Zmanda's support services, noting that it was refreshing to talk to technically-savvy people rather than someone in front of a computer screen that simply walks through some pre-defined steps. He has used Zmanda support several times and claims, "They provide high-end support and have been on the ball every time I need them."

"As long as you're a little bit technical, I can't see any reason to use any other product than Amanda Enterprise," he concluded.

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