Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare Achieves Instant Recovery with NAKIVO

Business Challenge

The Ministry of Health and Welfare is responsible for the administration of the public health system, social welfare, affordable and universal health care, hospitals, immunization programs, disease prevention, as well as supervision and coordination of local health agencies in Taiwan. The Social Welfare Organizations Administration Commission (SWOAC) at the Ministry of Health and Welfare was established in order to manage matters involving the administrative services of public health. The commission is comprised of 26 hospitals, 13 social welfare organizations, and more than 12,000 health professionals and social workers who serve at the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The IT infrastructure at the commission supports the administrative services needed to accomplish the mission of health and well-being for all stakeholders. “We started to virtualize our environment in 2011 and up to this date we have over 200 VMware VMs. VMware VMs run hospital applications, such as PKI, HIS, Electronic official documentation, and others,” says Vincent Liu, System Planner at SWOAC.

Downtime at the commission would delay appropriate arrangement of administrative services, therefore, virtual environments must be protected at all times. “Previously, we practiced the traditional way to copy data to a USB disk from a VM. The recovery process was taking way too long because we had to re-install a VM and then restore data to that VM. For that reason, we decided to look for a more efficient way to protect and recover our VMware environment because we wanted to avoid downtime,” says Vincent. In addition to downtime and data loss avoidance, high availability across the entire environment was desirable.

Solution

SWOAC selected NAKIVO Backup & Replication to improve data protection in their virtual environment. "We needed a complete solution, not just a product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides efficient VM backup and recovery features. In addition, web interface is intuitive and easy to manage. NAKIVO’s technical pre-sales department in Taiwan demonstrated to us how to instantly restore our VMware environment and we were sold on the solution," says Vincent.

Instant VM Recovery allows the commission to recover the full VM from the backup in just a few clicks. "Instant VM Recovery is the most essential feature. We no longer need to manually recreate the VM and then restore data to the VM. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the entire VM is recovered in exactly the same state as it was during the backup. Flash VM Boot recovers VMs in seconds, without waiting for full restore from backup files," says Vincent.

While NAKIVO Backup & Replication was chosen based on its fast recovery capabilities, VM backup and global data deduplication brought additional benefits. "With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we can perform VM backup on schedule and considerably reduce storage space with global data deduplication. Another advantage is that backup image is not tied to the database, so that we can transfer backup image to other locations. We just need to deploy NAKIVO Backup & Replication appliance to a remote site and the backup image can be restored immediately," says Vincent.

Results

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides SWOAC with fast VM backup and recovery. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the commission no longer spends extensive amount of time on VM recovery because Flash VM Boot enables instant recovery of VMware VMs. Moreover, VM backups can be conveniently scheduled and storage space reduction is beneficial. "Everyday we see money and time savings with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Now, we have achieved highly available data protection in our virtual environment,” says Vincent.

Company Profile

The mission of Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) is to promote health and well-being of all citizens in Taiwan. The vision is to assure quality, increase efficiency, distribute resources equally, take care of social vulnerable groups, establish a welfare society, and contribute to the international affairs. To help accomplish its mission, the Hospital and Social Welfare Organizations Administration Commission was established in July 2013 to handle the matters involving administrative services for public health. The commission is comprised of 26 hospitals, 13 social welfare organizations, and more than 12,000 health professionals and social workers who serve at MOHW. In accordance with the mission of health and well-being for all, the emphasis is put on the collaboration of health care and social welfare, in order to perform a variety of tasks and services in public affairs. For more information, visit www.mohw.gov.tw.