Health Imaging & IT - April 2008 - (Page 32)

special section: storage strategies sions, says Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Network Engineer Brian Bourkland. After deploying a new PACS, the hospital decided to implement EMC Centera as its archival storage solution. One of the best aspects of the EMC Centera, Bourkland says, is that archived information becomes immutable—it cannot be changed. EMC Centera fully protects the authenticity and security of archived information by applying a hash algorithm to every file. If someone were to change even one character, the system recognizes that change and saves it as a new object. “There’s no way to alter anything,” he says. “When you’re talking about a legal medical record that contains someone’s PACS images, that’s an excellent way to archive that information.” Bourkland has heard of organizations creating homegrown solutions. However, he doesn’t believe those solutions approach the level of protection offered by EMC Centera. “I think the product is the best design for archiving data that is in a fixed state; that is, the data are in final form. You wouldn’t want to use an EMC Centera like you would a SAN, but if you need to archive fixed content, you need a solution that no one in the organization can circumvent. EMC Centera provides this level of protection.” Another benefit of EMC Centera is that users can set up governance parameters to help comply with HIPAA and SarbaneOxley regulations. Before implementing EMC Centera, Bloomington was using an optical platter-based archive solution. EMC Centera is comprised of a redundant array of independent disk-based nodes. Nodes contain a processor, memory, and four disk drives with a capacity of 750 GB each in the Gen4LP model. EMC Centera’s performance has effectively put an end to complaints about the length of time it takes to retrieve an archived medical record. Bourkland says the EMC Centera is a more effective archive solution for today’s healthcare environment. Physicians can access patient data within the hospital or remotely through Bloomington’s SSL VPN, which they really appreciate. Bourkland notes that EMC Centera is easy to manage and significantly lowers system management activities and costs. The systems can intelligently dial into EMC and call for onsite repair, if necessary. EMC also offers a console that will run analyses as desired, or the facility can run reports onsite. These features, along with source and target EMC Centera systems for disaster recovery, put Bloomington in a comfortable position for data integrity and business continuity. The source EMC Centera replicates to the target. Each system is located in a separate data center. “If we lost a data center with one of the EMC Centera systems, we can connect to the other and resume production. Once the one that was lost is restored, they will automatically synchronize with each other.” 32 Health Imaging & IT | april 2008 Healthimaging.com http://Healthimaging.com

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Health Imaging & IT - April 2008 Contents On the Web The Enterprise News Update Cracking Down: CT Radiation Dose 3D Rendering: Options Galore Thinking Thin-Client Modality Review Ergonomics & Design Special Section: Storage Strategies Imaging Tools Technology Outlook People & Technology Technology Review IT Trends Reader's Resource Stat Sheet

Health Imaging & IT - April 2008

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