St. Joseph's is implementing the project over the next 30 days. Officials said the picture archiving and communications system (PACS) and the multitiered storage system supporting it will allow physicians and lab technicians to access patient information, data and X-rays in seconds from on-site and remote locations via a Web portal. The all-IBM storage system is expected to double overall performance and increase scalability five-fold.

"In health care, every IT dollar we spend is based on some clinical need, whether it's to allow a physician to practice more efficiently or to improve the quality of patient care," said Christopher Ryan, manager of IT at St. Joseph's. "The ability to have images available without having to store and retrieve film is the biggest impact from this project."

Ryan is replacing a single, outdated midrange EMC Clariion FC4700 storage array with a tiered storage-area network (SAN) built around a high-end IBM Enterprise Storage Server for primary storage, a midrange DS4300 array for secondary storage and an entry-level DS4100 array for online archival. The entire SAN will provide about 15TB of capacity, Ryan said. An IBM 3584 tape library with five linear tape-open drives will act as the permanent archival for the hospital's records, Ryan said.

"We looked at EMC and HP solutions. It would have been easier to go EMC because we had one in place, but the value add with IBM was its services and support. EMC at the time was outsourcing their service, and this was causing an issue for us," Ryan said.

Ryan also said he was able to extend the life of the health center's IBM AIX servers, which now run patient accounting applications, by three years by attaching them via SCSI to the ESS800 IBM hardware for additional back-end disk space.