Healthcare Enterprise Storage, Archival and Retrieval

Healthcare Enterprises must develop data storage archival and retrieval strategies that enable compliance with regulatory procedures while delivering cost-effective data storage backup and security needs for Picture Archiving and Communication (PACS) vendor solutions.

Escalating storage demands are being driven by the need for long-term information preservation, this coupled with the need to simplify data management requires new technology and a new way of thinking. The Sun StorageTek 5800 delivers a centralized data repository representing a third-generation approach to online archival that can improve clinical information lifecycle management while offering data management, protection and retention.

Traditionally the IT department in a Healthcare Enterprise was concerned with the business of the hospital; registration, billing, insurance and in recent years, with the development of electronic medical records. The relative amount of data generated by these activities was limited when compared to the total data that is generated in the Healthcare Enterprise of today, especially with the shift to PACS scale requirements. Management of a centralized data archive solution for a Healthcare Enterprise that includes PACS images has resulted in highly manual processes for management and protection of healthcare information. Further, hospitals and imaging centers are being locked into expensive systems that are not nimble enough to accommodate continuing PACS growth. In fact, this information growth is creating multi-terabyte problems that information technology practitioners must not only deploy across existing information technology departmental islands, but be able to organize and search upon while looking toward future requirements for interoperability, health information networks and scalability.

The central IT organization must evaluate and deploy a technology solution capable of handling the large amount of image data that these digital modalities generate. As the world's first Application-Aware Programmable Storage solution, the StorageTek 5800 system, formerly known as Project Honeycomb, blurs the lines between application server and storage, giving application developers new flexibility in the way their applications are deployed. By off-loading selected data services from the application server, the system can help improve the overall application price/performance while helping to lower cost and complexity. Examples of these services include metadata management, database queries, and custom services such as image resizing. By moving portions of the application to the data, rather than moving data to the application, picture archive and communication system (PACS) providers can deliver a more flexible, higher reliability solution.

The Sun StorageTek 5800 enables healthcare customers to manage medical image archives with an application aware system, representing a totally new category of storage that allows PACS and other applications to be efficiently deployed by leveraging compute resources inside the storage environment. Data integrity and failure tolerance are also improved as well as the provision of sophisticated mechanisms for organizing and finding data amongst hundreds of millions of files. With the Sun StorageTek 5800, the Healthcare Enterprise can grow from 8 – 1,000 terabytes non-disruptively and on-demand.

Everyone in healthcare understands healthcare data has many legal retention requirements. Daily backups can have a life of several days to weeks. Patient Records, Image Data and other patient information can have very long retention requirements, these retention requirements are often dictated by Federal and State regulations. These retention rules often exceed the expected life of the archived media and require the protection of privacy. Because of this, the management of disparate islands of archives throughout many departments becomes a logistical nightmare. The Sun StorageTek 5800 solves this issue with centralization that represents a single architecture that can manage critical Healthcare Enterprise data policies for Care, Disaster Protection, Access Control and Patient Protection procedures. Eliminating the information islands throughout the Healthcare Enterprise means data integrity is also increased, protecting better than ever against data loss, misuse or unauthorized access. Auditing mechanisms mean modification of data is not allowed. Retention directives ensure images and records are intact for the appropriate lifecycle of the data. At the same time, Sun StorageTek 5800 has the ability to store arbitrary metadata and to query against it. Sun StorageTek 5800 also supports a file system interface enabling users to view data in different ways.

For the PACS vendor, the Sun StorageTek 5800 is a great partner for delivering a total solution for next-generation data migration, retention and protection against media obsolescence that has historically proved to be problematic. PACS vendors who are very good at image acquisition and display need cutting-edge partner solutions in the area of data archive. By leveraging the Sun StorageTek 5800, PACS vendors are able to provide a low-cost parallel architecture for long-term data storage and data management that the Healthcare Enterprise can depend on to be self-healing in the event of failure, searchable and scaleable. Creating such a total solution will become more important in the future with the development of health information networks, requiring the ability to access information from multiple locations and their greater need for high availability, etc.

Sun StorageTek 5800 helps solve the conundrum of unstructured data storage, the explosion in data archiving and retrieval requirements, the need to simplify management and especially the need for dependability for Healthcare Enterprises and PACS vendors. Systems are available through industry leading medical imaging and information technology providers. Contact your local Sun representatives or email.