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Managing the explosion of digital medical images, diagnostic reports and patient medical records has become increasingly complex. At the same time, HIPAA, state and local healthcare regulations are becoming more stringent adding layers of complexity for data retention, access and preservation. The current solution for many IT departments is to use disparate storage solutions for different applications but this often leads to management nightmares and data inaccessibility resulting in an impact to business operations and patient care. Caringo object storage powered by CAStor solves these issues by providing a highly automated storage solution that provides a securely accessible unified medical archive for all your clinical data. CAStor is also natively accessible by many popular PACs applications and is currently being used by Medical facilities around the world.

Intelligent Automation and Guaranteed Integrity

Intelligent policy-based data life cycle management and continuous automated system optimization and self-healing make Caringo the perfect solution for your Medical archive and Clinical archive needs. Our highly automated approach enables you to maximize operational efficiency and easily comply with regulatory demands without manual intervention. The result is the ability to free up resources to focus on patient care.

  • Massively scale capacity – meet any demand: — Scale by simply inserting one, or more nodes into the cluster. Additional capacity is automatically available; no provisioning required by an administrator. Minimal administrative overhead makes it easy to increase storage up to petabytes of capacity in a single cluster.
  • Medical Imaging Software Integration — Caringo object storage software powered by CAStor is seamlessly integrated into leading medical imaging software applications including: Merge Healthcare's RadSuite PACs (medical imaging archive software), Acuo Technologies DICOM image management, archiving, and migration solutions, Teramedica's Evercore Smartstore (digital image and patient records archiving software), Dejarnette xDL (medical image archiving software), Karos Health's Rialto Vault (clinical information archiving), among others.
  • Runs on industry standard hardware — Storage clusters can be built on any X86 server with at least 1 GB of RAM, 1 hard drive, and Gigabit Ethernet. Use any combination of vendors and generations. As new technology becomes available, just plug the server in and CAStor will instantly provision it!
  • Self-optimizing — Even after an object is initially stored CAStor continuously monitors performance and will automatically move or replicate data in order to maintain responsiveness in the system.
  • Self-healing clusters — Polices set for each object are continuously checked and enforced. Should something fail, the system automatically recovers. If a disk goes down, all disks participate in the recovery effort.
  • Continuous integrity checks — CAStor's Health Processor continuously monitors data integrity and cardinality (number of replicas) and will automatically heal any degradation or non-conformity. Metadata life point rules are also checks and enforced.

Research hospital cost-effectively stores millions of high-resolution medical images weekly.

Hospital radiologists at a large research university routinely generate data using Emageon's RadSuite for advanced imaging. Medical images are saved to on-site storage over hospital's NFS network with hospital physicians accessing the stored images from a desktop file share. Because advanced medical imaging technology can generate petabytes of data the hospital quickly outgrew capacity in their powerful but expensive NAS devices. Hospital IT faced the challenge of how to cost effectively scale their storage system without sacrificing the ability to access the data for analysis, performance or reliability.

The Challenge

  • Store millions of images and studies weekly from RIS application
  • Provide immediate and long term research access capabilities
  • Offload capacity from expensive, high-end servers
  • Scale cost-effectively without impacting performance or reliability

The Solution

  • Add standard server hardware and Caringo CAStor to scale hospital and data center clusters
  • Migrate older, less active files and keep workflow on existing high-end storage servers
  • Enable future research access and business process with rich metadata

The Results

  • Cost Effective Scaling
  • RIS Application Access
  • High Performance
  • Continuous Availability
  • Long Term Integrity

The Configuration

  • Add standard x86 Dell hardware with Caringo CAStor software to existing storage
  • Create a smart distribution network based on file activity and age
  • Store new, highly active files generated from RadSuite to existing EMC and NetApp servers
  • Automatically migrate and protect older, less active files to Dell servers running CAStor
Caringo CAStor storage for healthcare