The disaster recovery improvements, says the clinic, are part of the unit's move to an interoperable IT infrastructure, and make use of a data archiving systems from BridgeHead Software plus a data storage system from BH MediStore.
This hard-drive-based archive, says the clinic, will replace a tape-based system and help to free up storage resources, as well as improve the availability of patient data.
According to IT staff with the clinic, the migration to a hard drive-based data archiving system will allow the IT department to back up all of the unit's data every six hours, rather than once a day, as with the old tape-based platform.
In addition, says the clinic, unlike generic backup, replication and mirroring tools, the move to a hard drive-based archiving system means that the MediTech database is properly quiesced prior to the backup process.
Quiescing is the process of pausing or slowing down the rate of data transactions prior to a back-up process, so ensuring that a `freeze frame' entire picture is backed-up to an archive, Infosecurity notes.
In the event that a restore is required, the quiesced version of the IT system can be restored and then run from the same point in time at which the backup took place.
Tony Tomkys, BridgeHead Software's director of sales, said that the disaster recovery installation involves removing static data from the primary backup stream and put it into a safer, more cost-effective storage environment.
This environment, he says, allows the data to be accessed by clinicians and hospital staff when and where it is needed, as well as secured in the event of a disaster or system outage.
* Mike Roberts, IT Director at The London Clinic, will be giving a presentation: `Data Free At The Point Of Need' at the BCS HealthCare 2011 conference in Birmingham tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon.