Fed up with tape, hospital moves to storage jukebox

Computerworld - When Cabell Huntington Hospital installed a new image and records archiving system late last year, it was given a choice of sticking with its optical disk jukebox and its spinning disk arrays or going back to magnetic tape.

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 at Cabell Huntington, said he considered going back to tape, a medium 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, England, 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 $2.5 million picture-archiving and communications system (PACS) so that 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 Corp.’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.

“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, Cabell Huntington’s radiology systems analyst.

Shah ultimately decided to upgrade the hospital’s optical jukebox to a 13TB model from Plasmon filled with 30GB platters.

Like many midrange disk arrays today, the optical jukebox a is considered a “nearline” storage system for the hospital’s PACS. Where it may have taken minutes or days to find data stored on tapes on and off-site, the jukebox offers up data in seconds, Shah said. It’s also a format that is clearly approved by regulators as a write once, read many technology.

Cabell Huntington built a two-tier storage infrastructure, where all data is stored on the EMC Clariion CX600 array for the first two years and then migrated to optical disk, where it’s copied to two platters; one off-site for disaster recovery and the other on-site for nearline storage.