Royal treatment for data

Royal Hospital Chelsea (RHC) in the United Kingdom has implemented a data archiving and backup solution that includes automated e-mail and file archiving.

The project is considered critical because of data protection and compliance pressures relating to RHC's association with the British Military and its roles as a healthcare facility and as a national treasure because of its place in British history. In fact, the same technology will be used to provide a searchable archive of its historical documents for posterity.

The RHC has chosen an integrated solution of Quest Archive Manager and BridgeHead Software's HT File Store to manage e-mail and file data respectively. According to Isabel Prieto-Cordero, RHC's IT and telecommunications manager, an evaluation of the solution led the hospital to expand the original scope for the project.

"We were actually amazed at what we could do with the full BridgeHead functionality set and our ability to potentially expand our archiving plans to include in the future essentially all of our data," Prieto-Cordero says.

RHC officials realized that the backup/recovery capability was more versatile than their previous software. For example, with the old backup system, Prieto-Cordero was accustomed to needing a whole day to rebuild and recover failed servers. Tests with BridgeHead HT Backup indicated that the process could be reduced to about an hour.

Also, the new system was able to archive general unstructured file data in addition to, and coordinated with, e-mail archiving from the Quest product.