Fed Up With Tape, Hospital Sings Praises of Jukebox

User weighs the cost of lost data

By Lucas Mearian

March 27, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - One day, Sanjay Shah, CIO at Cabell Huntington Hospital, simply stopped trusting magnetic tape for radiological image and patient-record backups. Instead, he and his IT team began using an optical disc jukebox for its backup and archive, and they have never looked back.

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.


Cabell Huntington Hospital uses Plasmon’s optical jukebox to store patient medical records.

"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, W.Va., 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.

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