"We've had real-life experiences with tape just going bad on the shelf, even though we rotate them out after 50 uses. We just felt more secure with optical," said Jason Hill, Huntington's radiology systems analyst.

Shah chose to upgrade the hospital's optical jukebox to Plasmon's 13TB model, filled with 30GB platters.

Shah uses his optical jukebox the same way many IT managers use midrange disk arrays: as near-line storage for the hospital's PACS. Whereas it may have taken from minutes to days to find data stored on tapes on- and off-site, the jukebox offers up data in seconds. It's also a format that is clearly approved by regulators as a WORM (write once, read many) technology, Shah said.

Huntington built out a two-tiered storage infrastructure, in which all data is stored on an EMC Clariion CX600 array for the first two years and then migrated to optical disc, where it's copied to two platters; one platter is off-site for disaster recovery and the other on-site for near-line storage.

Hill said he also likes the fact that if a server goes down, he can always restore it by just pulling a platter out of the jukebox and placing it in a blue-laser-compatible DVD drive.