Northeast Delta Dental of Concord, New Hampshire, administers dental benefits to nearly 700,000 people in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.  As a recognized expert in the dental benefits industry and one of 39 autonomous Delta Dental member companies nationwide, we underscore our world-class customer service with a comprehensive cash-backed service guarantee. We have won regional and national awards for our corporate social responsibility and best management practices, and contribute directly to oral health initiatives in our three states, as well as through our Northeast Delta Dental Foundation. 

Northeast Delta Dental offers a full range of dental insurance programs for businesses of all sizes and for individuals who lack access to group dental insurance through employers. Northeast Delta Dental's customers and 1,500 participating dentists depend on us to administer claims quickly and accurately. In 2008, the company processed more than 1.4 million claims, of which 99 percent were processed within 15 days of submission and with 100 percent accuracy.  Our data processing demands are increasing exponentially. As such, effective data storage, protection, and management are not only a corporate objective, but a critical part of our business.  

To meet its objectives, Northeast Delta Dental chose to replace its aging backup infrastructure with Quantum's DXi3500 disk-based appliance with data deduplication and replication technology. This architecture addresses backup window constraints, is easy to manage, compatible with existing hardware and capable of recovering backups from multiple locations. These appliancesone deployed in each of our two Concord Campus buildingsretain one month of backup data on disk, and replicate backups daily and weekly. In addition, daily backups are transferred to tape and stored offsite for one year.

Adopting Quantum's deduplication solution has reduced our backup load by more than 95 percent, allowing us to meet our nightly backup window, reduce IT staff hours spent dealing with backups and restores, and minimize our dependency on physical tapes. The DXi3500 solution has generated significant savings. As a non-profit organization, every penny spent on administrative expenses is a penny not spent providing affordable dental benefits. By saving us time and money, the DXi3500 solution helps Northeast Delta Dental deliver affordable dental benefits and the quick and accurate service our customers, dentists, independent insurance producers and consultants depend on.

Data deduplication is a new and revolutionary technology that has gained significant traction over the past two years. By identifying and consolidating redundant files and bytes or blocks of data, this technology can often reduce the amount of disk and network bandwidth needed for backup and replication by 90 percent or more.
While Northeast Delta Dental's previous disk-based backup architecture had served us well, it was no longer keeping pace with our data growth. Increasing data demands were reducing the amount of data we could retain onsite and the time required to retrieve a tape from offsite storage. Tape retrieval often took up to five hours making it difficult to fulfill recovery requests quickly. These challenges increased costs, impacted business staff, and robbed IT of time that could have been better spent on strategic corporate activities. 

By implementing the DXi3500 deduplication solution, we have not only gained the performance and reliability advantages of disk versus tape backups, but we can also back up more data on fast-recovery disk for longer periods of time. Data is only moved for long-term retention and disaster recovery. Data deduplication has cut restore times from hours to minutes, enabled us to increase on-disk data retention and has reduced our dependency on offsite tape backups. In addition, deduplication has delivered significant savings in power and cooling by reducing our required disk capacity.

Yes

Yes

Because the Quantum DXi3500 enables us to retain a month of data onsite instead of just a few days, we can now fulfill restoration requests from the business staff in minutes rather than hours, enabling them to return to regular duties quickly and efficiently.

Because backup and recovery is simpler and more reliable, our network administrator and IT staff can spend less time on repetitive management of backups and restores and more time on strategic projects. For example, configuring the Quantum appliances to act as Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices allows our Network Administrator, Matt Wilcox, to configure backup jobs without worrying about wasted disk space, load balancing or matching virtual volumes to physical tapes.

Additionally, because we can now easily replicate data between our two buildings, we have cut recovery time after critical disasters from days to hours, reducing downtime and impact to our customers and stakeholders.

The backup and recovery of critical user files is the responsibility of Northeast Delta Dental's network administrator, Matthew Wilcox and this became his biggest headache. He was forced to juggle tasks while trying to minimize wasted disk space on an aging Virtual Tape Library (VTL). With each change, he worried that the system wouldn't keep up with the increasing volume of data and he did not dare consider what would happen in the event of disaster. "Network backups should be as close to 'set it and forget it' as anything I do, said Wilcox.  Instead, I was tinkering with it almost daily and I thought there had to be a better way."

Quantum provided that better way.  

Using the web interface, Wilcox can see at a glance how much disk space is available, how much data has been reduced through deduplication and the status of replication to the second unit. The system even notifies him by email if it encounters a problem.  

Northeast Delta Dental has two fiber-connected buildings at the Concord, New Hampshire campus. With Quantums architecture in place, both of these buildings now have the ability to deliver all of the Company's critical services and files in the event of a disaster.

This is a major improvement over our previous backup system which was inflexible and unable to accomplish cross-site recovery. Had the primary site gone down, physical tapes would have to be recovered from storage. Then we would begin a slow process of restoring data from multiple tapes without access to the tape library.

We can now utilize the built-in replication function of the Quantum DXi3500.  We installed one unit in each building and configured replication with only a few mouse clicks during the initial setup. This process is now automatic requiring no additional work to keep the two units synchronized.

Although we were able to install and configure the two Quantum DXi3500 units in just a day, the initial backups took much longer to run than expected, threatening our ability to complete the backup of all our data in the available time window.

If we configured the device as a virtual tape library, we could use our fiber connection to increase speed. If we configured the device as a NAS, we were limited to a slower Ethernet connection, but the system was more efficient. 

 After deciding on the NAS solution, we worked with Quantum's technical team to optimize the throughput to the DXi3500.  Within days, we were able to apply a firmware upgrade that significantly improved device throughput.  We were also able to configure the two built-in Ethernet ports on the device to maximize communication from clients to backup servers, backup servers to the Quantum DXi3500 and replication between the two units. These modifications, along with some minor changes to the backup job scheduling, ensured wed meet our backup window.

Before choosing the Quantum solution, we carefully considered several other alternatives.  Ultimately, the DXi3500 provided the features we needed and the quality we expected.  Because we were careful in the decision-making process, we encountered little resistance when it came time to purchase and implement this solution.

Achieved

The most significant impact of this project is felt by our customers, stakeholders and business staff. Because our previous backup technology relied on offsite tape storage, a disaster at our primary building would have disabled many of our critical systemsincluding claims imaging, accounting, payroll, web servers and parts of our core claims payment applicationsfor at least a week. Deduplication lets us replicate live data to a second facility, reducing down time in the event of a disaster to less than one day. As a result, our customers, stakeholders and staff are only minimally impacted.

In IT, the most successful infrastructure implementations are those that go completely unnoticed by the end users. This project absolutely meets the criteria for success. The DXi3500 was seamlessly compatible with our existing backup software and there was no additional training required for operators. Our critical data is secure and we can respond faster than ever to data restore requests.