In concept, remote data replication assures data protection and recovery. In practice, it is fraught with difficulties: data transfer errors, network outages and high costs. Lengthy data transfer times make these difficulties all the more likely. Organizations that depend upon remote replication for business continuance demand swift, certain data transfer. CVS/Caremark, Inc., is one company that refused to compromise on its data transfer requirements and chose the Bridgeworks SANslide product to fulfill them.

CVS/Caremark, Inc., is one of America’s leaders in pharmacies and planned benefit administration with more than 7000 specialty pharmacy locations in 43 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. CVS/pharmacy also features MinuteClinic, the leader in retail-based health clinics. Its primary data centers are in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and Scottsdale, Arizona. With thousands of patients and customers depending upon CVS for their medication and health needs, downtime is unacceptable and business continuity must be assured.

To facilitate its business continuance strategy, CVS needed to replicate data from its Scottsdale data center to its Woonsocket data center on a weekly basis. CVS selected the Tributary Systems, Inc., (TSI) ViTAL virtual tape library system. It placed one system in each data center and connected them via IP over a shared OC 12 link; data is transferred asynchronously between the two VTL systems using iSCSI.

Don Lutes, senior technical advisor for CVS/Caremark, is responsible for managing the solution. “The VTL architecture worked as we expected,” said Lutes. “However, the network traffic on our link caused serious latency that negatively impacted our data transfer. In some cases, it would take up to 15 hours to transfer 50 GB of data. This was unacceptable and we needed a way to reduce the transfer time to less than four hours for our full backup, which exceeds 500GB.”

Lutes considered several solutions to the problem. One option was FCIP, but it would still require transfer over a clogged IP network. WAN accelerator products were also considered, but the high cost of these solutions caused Lutes to keep looking. He asked TSI for their recommendation and TSI suggested the Bridgeworks SANslide product. SANslide is an in-band 1U appliance engineered to eliminate the effects of latency and packet loss using sophisticated AI algorithms.

“We decided to do a pilot project with the SANslide product, because the implementation really had very little risk,” said Lutes. The whole implementation took less than a day. It didn’t require any additional cabling and mostly entailed the setting of two IP addresses per site.

About CVS/Caremark, Inc.

CVS Caremark is the largest pharmacy health care provider in the United States. Through our integrated offerings across the entire spectrum of pharmacy care, we are uniquely positioned to provide greater access, to engage plan members in behaviors that improve their health, and to lower overall health care costs for health plans, plan sponsors, and their members. As one of the country’s largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), we provide plan sponsors and participants access to a network of approximately 65,000 pharmacies including more than 7,266 CVS/pharmacy stores.

We employ approximately 200,000 colleagues in 44 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. As of June 30, 2011, we operated 7,266 retail stores, 66 retail specialty pharmacy stores, 18 specialty mail order pharmacies, four mail order pharmacies, and our CVS.com and Caremark.com Web sites. In addition, our MinuteClinic division runs approximately 500 retail-based medical centers in 26 states.