Harvard Vanguard Cures Data Backup Ills With EMC Avamar

Data Deduplication Technology Slashes Data Backup Size from 3.2 Terabytes to 1
Terabyte; Backup Time Reduced from 35 to 2 Hours

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 7 /PRNewswire/ -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the
world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that
Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, a multi-specialty medical group
delivering care to 450,000-plus patients at more than 20 offices across
eastern Massachusetts, has deployed an EMC Avamar(R) backup and recovery
solution to significantly increase the reliability and efficiency of its
growing backup operations while improving its IT efficiencies.

Harvard Vanguard previously performed tape backups of servers located at 18
different practice sites. Because the local staff could no longer keep up
with longer backup cycles, failing backups, finding lost tapes and cleaning
tape drives, Harvard Vanguard began sending its backups over the network to a
large tape drive in the main datacenter, but this solution also presented
issues.

"Our data requirements have increased significantly," said Rich April, Harvard
Vanguard's Director of Network Engineering. "When we performed the tape
backups locally, it was becoming too labor-intensive and failure-prone with
bigger backups - especially across 18 sites. So we centralized our tape
backups but it still would take 35 hours to complete. We'd have to run the
backups at night; pause them while people were in the office and restart that
night. Because the data had to be carved into different sections, it was a
complex process. And when tape backup jobs failed, as they often do, it was a
real headache because the backup window was frequently too congested to allow
for rescheduling of a failed backup."

The physician group decided to replace its Symantec Backup Exec tape backup
software with EMC Avamar to automate the backup process for financial and
billing data and other information to a centralized Avamar storage grid.
Harvard Vanguard also uses Avamar to replicate backups to another site 12
miles away for disaster recovery purposes in case the primary backup is
damaged or destroyed.

"With EMC data deduplication technology, we've been able to reduce the size of
data backups from 3.2 terabytes to 1 terabyte," said April. "Data backups now
take two hours instead of 35 hours. More importantly, EMC Avamar runs and we
almost forget it's there. It just drives everything and then automatically
creates two copies, so we have even more protection than before."

Before Avamar, a restore was a laborious process that took at least a day to
identify the tape, retrieve it from an offsite facility and recover the data.
There also would be costs for staff time and tape delivery. Harvard Vanguard
now restores data in minutes or hours depending on the restore size. With
corporate offices in Newton, Mass., Harvard Vanguard estimates that the number
of full-time equivalents (FTEs) dedicated to backup operations now handled by
Avamar was reduced from 4 to .25 FTEs. Additional savings related to tape
costs and powering tape drives that were "on" all the time were also achieved.

"By making our backups more reliable and less labor intensive, our IT staff is
able to focus on more important priorities," said April. "As a leader in
leveraging healthcare information technology to enhance patient care and
quality, Harvard Vanguard is always focused on creating new and better
healthcare delivery models so our IT staff has to be ready to deliver on new
ideas."

In addition, Harvard Vanguard stores data for all of its applications -
including Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Picture Archiving Communications
Systems (PACS), Oracle, file shares, Microsoft Exchange and others - on its
EMC CLARiiON storage infrastructure. Harvard Vanguard uses EMC NetWorker(R)
software for backup of its EMRs and EMC SnapView(TM) software for cloning
production data for backups and disaster recovery

In a major consolidation project, Harvard Vanguard has deployed VMware ESX
software to virtualize 120 servers onto 12 physical blade servers. By end of
2010, Harvard Vanguard is planning to have up to a total of 450 servers
consolidated.

"On average, we're adding 30 servers each year in datacenters with limited
heating and cooling capacity and floor space," said April. "With VMware so
far, we've been able to introduce 35 to 40 new virtual machines for test and
development and shut down another 60 to 70 servers that were coming off
warranty and were too costly to maintain. We're estimating a $1.8 million
savings in energy costs over three years and $2 million savings for server
maintenance over five years."

About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of
information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations
of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their
information. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at
www.EMC.com.

EMC, Avamar, CLARiiON and NetWorker are registered trademarks of EMC
Corporation. VMware and ESX Server are trademarks or registered trademarks of
VMware, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation

Patrick Cooley, +1-508-293-6583, cooley_patrick@emc.com