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.
"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.
Robert Amatruda, an analyst at IDC, said users generally don't choose between tape and optical.
"It's not an either/or thing. I think that the optical technologies have really got a play in the enterprise, but it's still a complementary model alongside tape," he said.
Amatruda acknowledged that optical disc technologies have tripled and quadrupled in capacity over the past year, but at $60 for a 30GB platter, tape still carries the day for price-sensitive users. A 100GB DLT-4 tape cartridge costs about $30, he said.
"At the end of the day, the optical automation market has been pretty small. It's not been a growing market," Amatruda said. "They need some pretty major endorsements from servers and systems vendors."