CAMBRIDGE, MA – The technology team at Cambridge Health Alliance is saving space, time and money and gaining peace of mind with its new system for backing up data.

Cambridge Health, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, runs three hospitals and more than 20 primary care practices throughout Cambridge, Somerville and Boston's metro-North communities.

That many hospitals and practice sites translates into thousands of patients and nearly 1,000 tapes for backing up patient information daily. Both the taping and data recovery proved slow. The backup window was getting smaller by the day.

Cambridge Health has more than 150 Windows and Linux servers with 4,000 users storing approximately 15 terabytes of data per week.

"With nightly full back-ups to our traditional tape system taking close to 24 hours to complete, our backup window was shrinking to where we wouldn't be able to meet our daily backup requirements," said Dan Doherty, IT systems operations manager for Cambridge Health.

To handle a situation that had nearly reached the breaking point, Doherty selected new technology developed by nearby Sepaton Inc. in Marlborough, Mass. Sepaton's virtual tape library ensures quick data recovery and restoration of critical patient data, said Doherty, who had also considered adding more tape drives, more tapes and more space to file them.

Cambridge could barely finish one full backup, let alone create a second tape for off-site storage somewhere else on campus.

With the Sepaton S2100, a virtual tape library system, Cambridge Health can back up more than one terabyte of additional data each night in five hours less time.

Sepaton's technology is powerful and scalable, W. Curtis Preston, vice president of service development at Framingham, Mass.-based GlassHouse Technologies, writes in a recent white paper.

What really differentiates the Sepaton S2100 is how the technology has broken the rules, Preston says. "Someone at Sepaton realized that, though they are pretending to be tape, they aren't really tape. What they really are is a custom file system built especially to store backup data."

The speed and scalability of Sepaton's virtual tape library appeals to many types of industries, said Bob Iocono, Sepaton's chief operating and financial officer.

"Our solution is a very horizontal solution," Iocono said. The company's largest vertical market has been finance. Wells Fargo and Citibank are customers. Competitors in the virtual tape library market include Quantum and EMC.

The Sepaton unit arrived at Cambridge Health last spring, and according to Doherty, life has been easier since. The unit was pre-configured to work with Cambridge's CommVault back-up software.

Doherty figures payback on the initial investment in the new technology will take about two years.

"We're seeing immediate benefits," he said, noting the timely and rapid backups, the ability to retrieve data quickly and the time saved by the IT team.

"The workforce we have can now do other things," he said. "We can redirect forces to other projects."