Christus Health, a US$2.3 billion company based in Dallas, initially decided to go with HT Backup from BridgeHead Software Inc. in Woburn, Mass., because the company was the only one that offered integration with its health care information system, said Mark Middleton, director of data centers and infrastructure at Christus. Since beginning its implementation of the new software, it's estimating a 30 percent reduction in cost for its backup software.

Christus, a Catholic health care company, decided in 2004 that it would consolidate its health care information systems on the Meditech Health Care Information System application from Medical Information Technology Inc. in Westwood, Mass. It then started looking for a backup system that would offer a high degree of integration with it, Middleton said.

Because BridgeHead's software did not support all of Christus' applications, the hospital chain was considering it only as a point solution for 350 Wintel servers, and it planned to continue using Legato NetWorker from EMC Corp. to back up its other 1,500 servers, Middleton said. However, the company not only got in writing that BridgeHead would write code compatible with any application Christus had, but BridgeHead also provided the Novell support within 90 days, Middleton said.

After completing the change-out at a San Antonio facility last year, Middleton is now in the process of rolling out BridgeHead's software across the enterprise, which he estimates will take 18 months. The organization uses EMC Symmetrix storage arrays, with the Meditech software taking up about 8TB of high-end capacity.

"Ultimately, there is half a petabyte that Bridgehead is involved with in some fashion," he said.