Last week, I received a phone call from Thomas looking for some help in figuring out the optimum storage strategy for his environment. Thomas is IT Director for a Texas based medical imaging group. The phone discussion took place 5:30AM so details are little bit hazy.
Recently, he installed a turnkey PACS solution encompassing Sun servers and EMC SAN and NAS storage for storing medical imaging studies (CT, X-ray, MRI, ...). He also has lot of archived medical films that he intend to digitize and store online ... 50TB+ if I remember correctly. He is concerned about storing this data on his expensive storage purchased as part of turnkey PACS solution!
He is looking for someone to advise him on the best strategy for storing this data. Unfortunately due to my added responsibilities and increased workload at ADIC, I am not able to help him actively. So if you have previous strategy experience in the medical imaging vertical and storage of digitized data, I will be happy to hook you up with Thomas.
Despite my hectic work schedule, I hope to continue being a sounding board for Thomas and people like him in healthcare segment.
Based on the equipment you listed, it would seem like your friend has the storage solution. My clinic, which likely is much smaller than your friends, is geographically dispearsed. We have pretty rudimentary servers at the point of acquisition, they immediately send the data to an AIC storage chasis that can grow to 36TB. It immediately sends to another identical unit offsite. Offline storage is where I struggle. If a nasty virus got loose overnight and could spread to all of our servers and then wipe them clean, well, I do not think I would come in the next morning, put it that way!
ReplyDeleteDrew,
ReplyDeleteAfter having designed infrastructure for PACS across 20+ geographically dispersed sites several times, most probably I understand your pain.
Anil