Fed up with tape, hospital sings jukebox praises

27.03.2006
One day, Sanjay Shah, CIO at Cabell Huntington Hospital, simply stopped trusting magnetic tape for radiological image and patient-record backups. Instead, he and his IT team began using an optical disc jukebox for its backup and archive, and they have never looked back.

Despite the higher costs for optical media, and analysts' views that it should complement rather than replace tape, Shah said optical is his "near-line" and long-term backup technology of choice.

"Twenty years from now, if there's an image we need, we can actually access it and not wind up saying, 'Oops, it's not there,' " Shah said. "That's part of the total cost of tape. If you can't access the data, then whatever you spent on the tape was a waste."

The 300-bed hospital in Huntington, West Virginia, first began using an optical jukebox from Melbourn, England-based Plasmon PLC to store medical records storage almost five years ago. At the time, the optical platters each held about 9GB of data.

But in December, the hospital installed a $2.5 million picture-archiving and communications system (PACS) that allows doctors and technicians to view radiological images and patient records from any secure port connection.

Shah decided that the hospital needed a more sophisticated and higher-capacity backup technology, so he looked at EMC Corp.'s Centera content-addressed storage array, as well as the latest tape libraries. The Centera was too costly, and tape was still not reliable enough, he said.