Robert Dillard, the vice president of technology services at Healthcare Realty, appeared on the latest episode of SiliconANGLE’s Cube Conversations series to share how his company manages business information, with Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante. He provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a decentralized organization where corporate data must not only be readily accessible to employees wherever they may be, but also protected at all times and meet strict compliance audit requirements as well.

Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Healthcare Realty is a publicly-traded real estate investment trust that owns, maintains and develops properties – primarily medical offices – throughout the United States. The firm has north of $3 billion in assets under management and employs about 250 workers, including 90 in its headquarters and another 160 spread across the country.

As the head of the company’s IT and application development teams, Dillard is responsible for keeping operations running smoothly and provide services to the broader workforce. That includes backup and recovery, which Healthcare Realty has historically relied on tape to deliver.

From tape to virtualization

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While cheap, tape has a number of major disadvantages, Dillard tells Vellante. It’s slow, for one, which makes it difficult to meet backup windows and increases the risk of spillover into the workday. Recovery takes even longer, since the physical drives have to be retrieved from an off-site location before restoration can be performed. And to make things even worse, tapes have a tendency to degrade, which means that there’s no guarantee data will remain uncorrupted.

For these reasons, Healthcare Realty switched to a disk-based solution when the opportunity to do so arose following an organization-wide consolidation, Dillard recalls. The firm now operates two VMware-virtualized data centers, one in Nashville and another in Denver, and uses a dedicated backup and recovery appliance from EMC DataDomain. The platform runs on NetWorker 8.1, and carries out backups in parallel rather than sequentially like the tape system it replaced.

• Next step: automation

Dillard says that the next phase of the journey will be transitioning to a more automated, user-centric environment – or backup-as-a-service, as Vellante calls it. The goal is to speed recovery and eliminate the administrator as a single point of failure.

“For the backup admin to configure a system to be backed up, he has to be told that system has been created,” he explains. “At times, there was a breakup in communications or a time lag between when a system was brought online and needed to be backed up and when the backup admin was getting that system backed up.”

Healthcare Realty hopes to clear this bottleneck by aligning the role of the backup administrator with business objectives, moving beyond manual operations with pre-defined policies that can be applied as needed.

“The backup admin’s job is to understand what the requirements are from the business standpoint for protecting the data, and configuring the policies for protecting that data, and making those policies available to the SQL admins and VMware admins. And then ensuring there is base level compliance across all of our systems and across all of our data,” Dillard details. Those practitioners would then be able to add high-level data protection functionality on top in order to address specific workload requirements.

The initiative is part of what Dillard describes as a broad internal effort to automate IT operations and kill two birds with one stone in the process, driving operational efficiencies while simplifying compliance and auditing. He says that his firm intends to provide more self-service functionality for business users as well as developers.

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