Gilbert said second-tier storage systems were traditionally tape-based and less expensive. This type of architecture, however, presented certain difficulties in the healthcare sector, which often deals with emergency situations.

"Because of our business requirement of being able to see these images through a Canada-wide emergency record if we need to, the time required to go and actually locate a tape, put it in a drive, extract the image and present it back to the first tier (system) would take far too long," Gilbert explained.

HPMA, however, provided low-cost disks set up in a redundant array with extra built-in features like image error correction, the ability to shift images between two mirroring data centers for optimized data distribution, and the "optional license protection" that allows easy migration of data as the storage architecture changes, Gilbert said.

Images stored on the HPMA are also protected by digital signatures to prevent tampering, said David Mosher, business manager for healthcare at HP Canada.

"When you have a medical image, you want to make sure it's not altered once it's created, (hence) protecting the integrity of the data," Mosher said.