The Royal Surrey County Hospital Trust has deployed a network attached storage gateway product from Nas vendor ONStor to store X-rays, reports and patient records.
The Nas gateway was required by the Trust in order to help expand its diagnostic capabilities with radiology and cardiology PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) from two different suppliers: GE and Heartlab.
Accepted industry practice is to store data in separate silos, one for each PACS, meaning two new storage environments in addition to the McKesson Health Information System already in place. Managing three separate pools of data storage and archive within a single facility seemed highly inefficient, so the hospital's IT managers looked for a better solution.
According to Simon Mortimore, Information Manager at the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Trust, conventional Nas appliances had three significant drawbacks. Cost was a major consideration as the hospital required 20TB of storage. The NAS appliance and the NAS heads alone would have cost nearly 250,000, excluding storage.
Another shortcoming was limited scalability. When the PACS outgrew the capacity limitations of the initial NAS appliance, the hospital would be forced to add more storage which the trust back in the exact scenario they were trying to avoid in the first place, using multiple islands of storage. The third drawback was limited open storage support. Also, 30 of available capacity would be lost to file system overheads.
According to the trust, IT managers at the hospital were able to use existing storage hardware and software through the gateway. The new gateway allows the hospital to scale up to 40 Petabytes of storage within a single storage pool, which meant it didn't have to manage multiple storage silos. It also cost the trust 65 per cent less than rival Nas vendors.
Mortimore said the gateway provided "impressive data throughput and availability together with a much reduced management overhead, while the SUN/Storagetek San has future-proofed the data storage needs of the Trust for the next few years with plenty of scope for expansion, and anxiety about our back-up window is a thing of the past."
"Once we had overcome the challenges of data migration, the benefits of this solution became immediately apparent," he said.
