Healthcare Ad Firm Prescribes VTL for Backups

Grey Healthcare Group has carved out a successful niche in the highly competitive advertising industry by maintaining a sharp focus. When the company experienced trouble with its tape backup system, it decided to find an alternative approach. That decision lead to deployment of a virtual tape library.

Grey Healthcare Group develops multi-channel advertising campaigns for pharmaceutical companies. The advertising firm's programs integrate consumer and professional advertising, branding, medical education, search optimization, and managed care strategies. The company, which operates on five continents, has about 500 employees, including a handful of sites in the U.S. Its client list includes Essilor, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.

Because the advertising firm had been growing, the increase was straining its Dell tape system, which maintained 8 TB of information. Grey Healthcare Group works with a lot of complex video and animation files, so the company understood that it needed to double the size of its backup storage system.

While the growth in the business was welcome, the changing storage requirements were causing problems. The company had staggered its backup times, so all of its data was copied weekly. As the time needed to complete the different backups grew, it became more difficult to finish the work within the various backup time windows.

There were also problems whenever the company had to recover data. "The time needed to recovery important data was increasing from three to four days," says IT director Chris Watkis.