Boston Scientific and the Cloud-First Push

Boston Scientific – a leading medical device company based out of Boston, Mass. – is working to execute a cloud-first IT strategy, with the goal of evolving to a half on-prem, half cloud infrastructure by the end of this year.

According to a recent case study by Dell, Boston Scientific’s IT transformation goals include a major move to a cloud-first posture.

The company wanted cloud data protection for its SQL and Oracle databases that they could expand globally via Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, and that would be simple for database administrators to use for managing their own backups, the case study says.

As a step toward that goal, Boston Scientific has updated its data protection with a Dell EMC solution that includes PowerProtect Data Domain Virtual Edition (DDVE) in AWS as a target for backing up the company’s databases.

“Boston Scientific is going through a transformation from on-prem to the public cloud. Our mantra is ‘cloud first’ before putting resources on-prem. So that’s where the need for DDVE comes in,” said Tim Hudoba, Boston Scientific’s senior storage administrator – whose primary job at Boston Scientific is to maintain backups and data protection with Dell’s PowerProtect Data Domain (DD) appliances and DDVE.

Dell’s DD series is the ultimate protection storage appliance. The tool enables organizations to protect, manage, and recover data at scale. It sets the bar for efficient data management from edge to cloud and includes ecosystem support and comprehensive data protection.

Hudoba said Boston Scientific leverages Dell’s data tool in the AWS public cloud. The company currently has the DDVEs in two different regions: Northern Virginia and Ireland. And coming soon, in Tokyo.

“Because of the ease of AWS Marketplace, we can spin up a DDVE in about two or three hours,” Hudoba said.

He explained that the three benefits for DDVEs in AWS are:

• The ease of creating an instance and getting it prepared for production use. “Using the AWS Marketplace is fairly easy. Once we click on our DDVE, subscribe to it, it launches that Cloud Formation stack,” Hudoba said. “We just wait until it finishes, and we can perform our final configurations.”
• The use of the database agents and how easy it is for database administrators to set those up.
• The high deduplication rates that the company is getting on its DDVEs. “We’re seeing just shy of 45X dedupe rate,” Hudoba said. “It’s great to see that. There’s nothing like being able to squeeze 54 terabytes into 1.2 terabytes of space.”

“All I can say is, I’m glad Dell has provided PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition in AWS,” Hudoba said. “I don’t know what we’d do without it.”