Nirvanix: A solution for medical image archives

Rampant growth of data a natural for a cloud-based repository

Developments of the week in storage

Medical image archives are growing at an alarming rate and taxing IT with the problem of storing them and being able to access them rapidly for review by healthcare clinicians. Growth is so rampant now that images are digital that SSG-NOW research estimates that there will be approximately 970 million imaging procedures performed in the United States this year - that volume is expected to increase to 1.15 billion by 2014. 

The amount of storage required for medical images is compounded by the growth in size of the medical image itself. Each image can be of widely varying size with magnetic resonance images (MRIs) sized at 23MB, echocardiograms at 350MB and 256-slice CAT scans at 5 to 10GB.

Storing these images on-premises on primary storage and accommodating for growth is a challenge for IT, who may have limited resources and tight budgets dedicated to the image archive. Compliance with HIPAA and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which mandate the retention of medical images, is also forcing the hand of many an IT manager, who when tasked with setting retention policies for data, opts to retain images for the life-time of the patient. Additionally, government mandates require that IT protect these medical image archives, implement disaster recovery methods to recover them in the event of a natural disaster and secure them when they are exchanged with other healthcare organizations.

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Medical image archives are growing at an alarming rate and taxing IT with the problem of storing them and being able to access them rapidly for review by healthcare clinicians. Growth is so rampant now that images are digital that SSG-NOW research estimates that there will be approximately 970 million imaging procedures performed in the United States this year - that volume is expected to increase to 1.15 billion by 2014. 

The amount of storage required for medical images is compounded by the growth in size of the medical image itself. Each image can be of widely varying size with magnetic resonance images (MRIs) sized at 23MB, echocardiograms at 350MB and 256-slice CAT scans at 5 to 10GB.

Storing these images on-premises on primary storage and accommodating for growth is a challenge for IT, who may have limited resources and tight budgets dedicated to the image archive. Compliance with HIPAA and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which mandate the retention of medical images, is also forcing the hand of many an IT manager, who when tasked with setting retention policies for data, opts to retain images for the life-time of the patient. Additionally, government mandates require that IT protect these medical image archives, implement disaster recovery methods to recover them in the event of a natural disaster and secure them when they are exchanged with other healthcare organizations.

IT wants to not only protect and secure their medical image archives, but convert capital expenditures (CAPEX) for storage capacity to operational expenditures (OPEX). But, expenditures for conventional, physical storage are not always the answer to medical image archives. Cloud-based storage, which can turn CAPEX into OPEX with its pay-for-use model, can also help IT comply with regulations that require them to retain medical images and protect them by backing them up and implementing disaster-recovery techniques.

Among the organizations surveyed in a recent report from Storage Strategies NOW on Cloud Storage: Adoption, Practice and Deployment, 63% of the healthcare organizations expected to deploy cloud storage. Finding a cloud storage provider that can accommodate and protect these image archives is another matter.

There are only a few vendors that offer cloud-based medical image archive services. Among them is Nirvanix. Nirvanix from its eight data centers offers not only a pay-per use model in which customers can turn CAPEX into a OPEX expense, but a centralized repository for medical images. With its global namespace, Nirvanix provides healthcare providers with continuous access to large-scale medical mages at multiple, redundant locations without dealing with time-consuming fail-over scenarios or the cumbersome requirement of having to upload the same image multiple times in multiple regions to ensure global access. 

With Nirvanix, healthcare providers can upload an image just once and rest assured that it will be available from any location in the world. The company's private and hybrid cloud storage services and its public Cloud Storage Network make it possible for healthcare organizations to grow easily into accessible image archives and protect them from disaster. Images can be kept on-premises with Nirvanix's Private Cloud Storage service and migrated when they are infrequently accessed to Nirvanix's public cloud, where they can be protected in redundant locations. Further, Nirvanix has an ingest rate of up to 10TB per per pay, per customer, capable of handling large unstructured image files.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.