Legacy healthcare data storage struggles to keep pace with the new innovations in healthcare modalities and research due to a mismatch between performance and capacity. Traditionally, as capacity increases, performance does not keep up, which creates a system that eventually hits limits. In the past, this was one of the reasons data silos were created, each with a limited capacity but with an acceptable performance.
Improving patient care, both at local hospitals and also at regional/research hospitals, has seen the adoption of multiple healthcare PACS (Picture Archive and Communication Systems) servers, each that specialize in specific sciences. The PACS market is growing rapidly, and includes radiology, cardiology, pathology, and other specialty PACS. In the past, multiple PACS meant multiple archive storage systems, and therefore siloed data.
Today, in many larger environments, VNAs (Vendor-Neutral Archives) have taken over control of the archive from individual PACS which removes the silos. This means new healthcare PACS systems can be adopted without expensive data migrations from one PACS vendor to another. VNA systems communicate via DICOM protocols with modalities and healthcare PACS systems, acting as the key data repository for all medical images. With hospitals adopting more modalities and with higher and higher resolutions – plus the move from 2D to 3D, and now 4D and 5D scanning – data storage requirements are growing exponentially.
VNAs and PACS today can benefit from a single modern scale-out NAS archive storage solution that can scale to support the performance and capacity requirements of billions of images. These types of data storage solutions offer both on-premises and/or in the cloud, provide built-in efficiencies to lower costs, and include features to secure storage environments and meet regulation requirements.
Leading VNA and PACS providers and hospitals are turning to Qumulo’s modern data storage to better meet their customer requirements.
Qumulo hybrid cloud file storage offers a fast, cost effective, and secure image storage and archive solution to manage and retain the massive data volumes generated by imaging systems today. Qumulo’s file storage, together with leading PACS and VNA providers, delivers a complete and trusted enterprise medical imaging solution that consolidates storage while providing fast, reliable access to data.
With Qumulo’s hybrid architecture, healthcare organizations benefit from the performance of flash for fast write/read access, as well as the economics of HDD storage for PACS archive, in a single file storage solution. Organizations are able to eliminate the complexity and costs associated with managing multiple storage tiers, and can easily grow performance and capacity to meet the demands of today’s expanding medical imaging technologies.
Qumulo’s software-defined design utilizes clusters of nodes made up of Qumulo hardware, or pre-qualified, industry-standard hardware from HPE. Organizations can deploy and scale Qumulo on-prem, in multi-geographic data centers, and/or in multiple cloud environments, including AWS and GCP, as and when required. Qumulo provides continuous replication across storage clusters, whether on-prem or in the public cloud, along with built-in data protection through local and remote snapshots, to ensure data is preserved and is always available.
Qumulo partners with key healthcare infrastructure vendors, and PACS and VNA providers, to deliver data storage solutions that assure compliance with government and institutional data privacy and security regulations, as well as meeting HIPAA regulations for compliance, including encryption and off-site copies.
Our unique built-in real-time analytics provide insight across the entire file system, to enable hospital system storage administrators to easily monitor storage usage and performance trends. With this superior visibility, healthcare organizations can gain control, and reduce overall operational and capital costs, by proactively managing current needs as well as better predicting future storage requirements.
Qumulo’s hybrid cloud file storage helps today’s healthcare organizations transform to support technologies of the future. They can free themselves from costly and complicated legacy storage systems and embrace new, higher resolution diagnostic and imaging innovations with ease. Further, organizations have the ability to consolidate data to streamline workflows, and easily scale to accommodate rapid growth, either on-prem or the cloud, allowing them to continuously improve patient services and commercial efficiency. Find out more, contact Qumulo.
