The 300-bed hospital in Huntington, W.Va. chose to stay with its unconventional optical disk format because, as its CIO said, the system saves money and has so far offered great reliability.

Sanjay Shah, CIO Cabell Huntington, said he considered going back to tape, a media his hospital left behind five years ago, but he had stopped trusting magnetic tape for radiological image and patient records backups.

'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 hospital first began using an optical jukebox from Plasmon PLC in Melbourne, U.K., for medical records storage in 2001. At the time, the optical platters held about 9GB of data each.

In December, as the hospital moved to install a US$2.5 million-picture archiving and communications system (PACS) so doctors and technicians could view radiological images and patient records from any secure port connection, Shah studied more sophisticated and higher-capacity backup technologies. He looked at EMC's Centera content addressed storage array, for instance, as well as the latest tape libraries. But the Centera system, he said, was too costly. And tape was still not reliable enough.