Andy Fuss has all the bases covered when it comes to protecting his data at Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, R.I. Fuss, who is lead technical engineer at the medical center, installed two Data Domain DD565 Appliances in March of this year - one at the hospital and the second device at a disaster recovery site located 100 miles away.

"We were looking for a backup solution that reduced our extraordinarily long back up window and for something that gave us a good compression ratio for data de-duplication," says Fuss. "One of the huge considerations for us is replication for disaster recovery."

Fuss does weekly full and nightly incremental backups. “The Data Domain appliance looks at the incrementals as if they were full backups,” says Fuss. “Weekly backups that would take us 26 hours before, now take 15 to 16 hours and nightly backups take only 1 1/2 to 2 hours.”

With the Data Domain appliance, Fuss also solved another problem – that of having employees waiting for him to recover files that they had lost.

“It was the third day of our ‘go live’ with Data Domain when our CEO called for a file restore in her own directory, and I said let's go a head and restore the file,” says Fuss. “I restored the file while I was on the phone with her. What used to take 40 minutes before to recover from tape, now takes about 4 seconds.”

Fuss complements the use of the Data Domain appliance with Legato Networker software to backup 5TB of data. He presently backs up data once a day, but is looking to increase that frequency.

Once a month, Fuss still spins off a cron job of his data to satisfy legal requirements (a cron job is a Unix command for scheduling a job that is to occur periodically). But, eliminating tape has saved him about $6,000 a year in tape cartridge costs.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.