Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

WorldCare: Page 3 of 3

WorldCare manages about 2 Tbytes of storage today, but this is growing massively, according to Khan. He is in the process of adding another 1.5 Tbytes this month. The company uses a Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) 9200 array as a large network-attached image server from which its staff can grab and view images in near real time. It archives the images on Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) DLT libraries.

Alongside the consultation business, WorldCare operates a clinical trials imaging division. This stores and manages the reading of tens of thousands of medical images in any given trial going on at one of WorldCare's consortium hospitals.

The company looked at technology from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS), and Procom Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: PRCM) but said that these were all too slow to push the images. "What sold us on FalconStor was they also support iSCSI," says Minkov. "It is cheaper than buying expensive fiber optic switches to use a real SAN Those Brocade Communications Systems Inc. [Nasdaq: BRCD] switches are not very cheap." WorldCare has no plans for a SAN right now, but since FalconStor can provision storage from SAN and NAS devices, once its network-attached storage infrastructure gets big enough it anticipates building an iSCSI-based SAN.

It seems like HIPAA regulations, coupled with such online applications as picture archiving communications systems (PACS) and electronic patient records (EPR), are driving an explosion of digital content -- and it's all good stuff for the storage industry (see TeraMedica, Maimonides Medical Center, and Neurome Inc.