Kinderspital Zürich (Zurich Children's Hospital)

Story Details

The use of new imaging procedures is creating up to five terabytes of additional data per year at the Kinderspital Zürich (Zurich Children’s Hospital). While the main source of the data is the hospital's new Picture Archiving & Communication System (PACS), other technical sources and individual physicians in the hospital are also contributing to the data growth with digital images and videos.

With this deluge of data, the hospital's existing SAN infrastructure was overtaxed and a conversion of this infrastructure would prove to be costly. Furthermore, the challenge of safeguarding statistical data could not be resolved. Therefore, Information Technology Manager Christoph Graf and his team began evaluating a new storage solution. The most important criterion for the new solution was providing an upgrade and migration path for future system growth. After careful evaluation, the Children’s Hospital decided upon a scalable solution from Hirt Informatik AG and Sun.

Out of five alternatives, the hospital narrowed its options to two competing solutions. “Both proposals were technically convincing,” Graf says, “but solution partners Hirt Informatik and Sun convinced us overall because of their greater depth of experience and their professional approach.” The IT manager also took note with satisfaction that the price was somewhat lower, but that was not decisive. “In this project, the price for us was not the highest priority. We were more focused on finding a solution that would be able to grow with us flexibly as the volume of our data expanded,” Graf explains. It was also important to him that Sun could produce references to similar successful deployments in medical environments.

The Children’s Hospital solution includes Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM) software to classify and manage data over its entire lifecycle. Thanks to the flexible manner in which the SAM software can be configured and the structure of the PACS, it was possible to implement a robust, simple configuration.

The PACS first saves the data on a fast disk for short term storage. The data remains available here until the attending physician has made a diagnosis. The images, along with the physician’s report, are then written in a second tier subsystem based on the Sun StorageTek 6140 array with good access time. In addition, another level of data security takes place by backing up the data onto Sun StorageTek L180 tape library with LTO 3 tape drives. The team also makes a second copy of the archived data on Sun StorageTek SL500 tape library with LTO 3 tape drives. The security concept provides two copies of the data at any time. The data is directly accessible, regardless of where the data is physically stored.

The Sun and Hirt Informatic solution provides the hospital with the flexibility to add new capabilities and support new systems and services. The solution has required a constant number of IT employees to administer it, in spite of a tenfold increase in the amount of data. In addition, the Sun storage solution scalably manages the volume of data which is expected to grow from 10 terabytes to 25 terabytes over the next five years.