HIMSS: 10 Hot Storage, Image And Disaster Recovery Products For Health Care

Wisconsin-based Aspirus, a non-profit system of hospitals, clinics and other health care campuses with about 4,200 employees and 400 licensed inpatient beds, relies on several pieces of EMC's networked storage portfolio to support its electronic medical record, clinical management applications, and PACS radiology and cardiology imaging systems. EMC brought Aspirus to HIMSS to tout its health care practice, and Aspirus consists of EMC Clariion CX4 networked storage with enterprise flash drives and Clariion CX3 and EMC Celerra for the PACS systems. According to Aspirus, it will also soon incorporate EMC SourceOne to archive e-mail from Microsoft Exchange and recently added EMC NetWorker and EMC Avamar backup software for data dedupe and automated backup and recovery.

Compellent in mid-January unveiled Storage Center 5, the latest release in its Fluid Data storage lineup, offering portable volume replication, scaleable SAS storage, automated tiered storage with RAID 6 protection, virtual ports I/O technology, server mapping, provisioning and other features. According to Compellent, the offering also allows for block-level virtualization. The company's entry-level configurations start at about $21,100, and the basic package gets you 10-GB SAS storage, dual clustered controllers and most of the available software bundled as a package.

Simpana 8 is the updated version of CommVault's so-called "holistic data management solution:" a unifying codebase in an offering that incorporates archive, backup and recovery, replication, resource management and search. Simpana 8 includes embedded global deduplication, remote office data recoverability and laptop/desktop data recoverability, snapshot backup, virtual server protection and content organization. At HIMSS, CommVault is showing off Simpana 8 as it relates to eDiscovery and health-care compliance, showcasing alongside an end-user customer, Temple University Health System.

SunGard's disaster recovery and business continuity services are what put it on the map, and the company has continued to add to the offerings it has available for health-care settings. The company's AdvancedRecovery suite comes in three versions: AdvancedRecovery with Online Backup (which includes Secure2Disk AdvancedRecovery), AdvancedRecovery with Server Replication (which SunGard says can get applications up and running in 30 minutes with failover, and also offers virtual server replication), and AdvancedRecovery with Storage Replication. At HIMSS, Sungard is presenting its services along with a case study looking at how a major medical center cut its data recovery time for lost medical records from 60 hours to 24 hours.

eMix, a new business venture and large file distribution platform from hospital imaging and information management vendor DR Systems, stands for Electronic Medical Information Exchange: a cloud-based offering designed to share medical imaging studies, reports and graphics between healthcare facilities and physician practices. The end goal of eMix, according to DR Systems, is to facilitate how big medical files are moved around between various EMR systems and also personal health records (PHR), hoping to make the process as easy as sending e-mail. The company is piloting business-to-business exchanges and plans to launch a new patient portal for business-to-consumer data exchanges later this year -- hoping to put cumbersome paper medical records (like those at left) in the rearview mirror.

i365, a Seagate company, has a number of data protection and retention products and services, including EVault Data Protection, Retention Management, MetaLINCS E-Discovery and ProServ professional services. More recently, the company has been acclaimed for the cloud-based versions of its services, which through partners it offers data protection, e-mail archiving, electronic discovery and tools such as data restoration, migration and erasure. The company has been continuing to hone its cloud pitch. Its HIMSS demonstrations include how software developers can offer applications that tie directly into the i365 storage cloud.

Acuo Technologies specializes in medical image management software and tools for data migration. The company's DICOM Services Grid, a vendor- and PACS-agnostic archiving tool, runs on an an asset management platform called AcuoStore, whose Digital Asset Manager allows users to track, store and retrieve images managed in the archive. Acuo's become popular in health-care enterprises and exchanges as a go-to for medical image storage and management, and the company recently tweaked its Services Grid to include both DICOM and non-DICOM clinical content, meaning it can now archive most medical image content both inside and outside the National Electrical Manufacturers Association's DICOM standard.

At HIMSS, Quest is showing off a joint desktop and workflow offering that combines Quest's vWorkspace virtual desktop management suite and HealthCast's eXactACCESS single sign-on and clinical workflow tools. The goal, according to the companies, is to automate how clinical workers access and manage virtual desktops and virtual applications without requiring different passwords for different systems. HealthCast provides a proximity badge that automates login to the Quest software based on the person it identifies. Workers can "tap" their badge and log on to their virtual desktop and applications, according to Qwest, then disconnect and reconnect at other workstations in an enterprise. Above all, says Qwest, the point is a combination of security and smooth hospital workflow to help enterprises meet guidelines for meaningful use of EMR systems.

Iron Mountain's big HIMSS announcement is an updated version of its Digital Record Center for Medical Images that enables storage, back up and archiving of digital medical information in the cloud as a "hybrid" on-site and off-site storage-as-a-service model. Among new features, according to Iron Mountain, are various service plans for protection and redundancy: Mirrored Cloud (a service that stores two copies of each medical image offiste), Hybrid Cloud (one copy onsite and one offisite), and Hybrid Cloud2 (single copy onsite and two copies offsite). Further features include data shuttle (fast movement of large data files to Iron Mountain's own data center) and optional onsite storage to supplement available cloud storage.

Legacy Data Access is wholly devoted to the health-care industry, offering a suite of storage and data management products that perform data retention for all sizes of health-care organizations and offer access to that data -- most often retired or outdated health-care applications that retain critical patient medical information -- in a hosted, Web-accessed format. LegacySuite doesn't require any data conversion, and according to Legacy Data Access offers storage for legacy application data for mainframe, Unix, MUMPS and Windows platforms alike. The company also provides assistance with clinical data compliance requests such as billing and organizing the data it hosts for audits and other procedures.