Case Study: Latrobe Community Health Service achieves 27% lower data-protection costs and 2TB backup reduction with IBM Spectrum Protect

Cuts backup volumes by 2TB with IBM Spectrum Protect software

Latrobe Community Health Service, a not‑for‑profit healthcare provider in Victoria supporting over 500 staff and volunteers across 120 programs and eight clinics, needed to improve flexibility, reliability and speed of backups to handle growing, highly regulated patient data (some records retained up to 20 years). Facing long tape-based backup windows (up to 36 hours), recovery risk and stricter reporting/compliance requirements, Latrobe turned to IBM and its IBM Spectrum Protect family (IBM Spectrum Protect and IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments) to modernize data protection.

IBM implemented Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments to move Latrobe from tape to disk, automate backups, use VMware Changed Block Tracking for faster VM backups, and enable a secondary disaster‑recovery site. As a result, IBM’s solution cut daily backup volumes by 2 TB via deduplication, reduced total cost of ownership by 27%, shortened file recoveries from hours to minutes (saving 2–3 hours), and improved compliance, reporting and overall recovery time objectives.

Latrobe Community Health Service

Wayne Twite

IT Manager