Scott Edie, director of Ballarat Health Services, said the request for a storage and backup management solution went to the market a year ago.

"Principally we were after a storage solution that would have improved fault tolerance and disaster recovery for a number of large applications that we run."

The hospital had already bought virtualization technology from VMware and needed a SAN to help make it run efficiently.

Edie chose systems integrator Global Storage to supply the dual-site SAN and three-tiered storage system.

Based on a Commvault suite, it features an auto robotic tape library, SATA disk array and a Fibre Channel disk array with Fibre Channel fabric.