Healthcare Seeks Storage Rx

Here's a tip for storage companies looking to tap into the lucrative healthcare field: Know your customer.

So says Robert Cecil, network director of radiology and cardiology for the Cleveland Clinic. He says storage companies are to blame for healthcare being a slow adopter of technology because they don't know how to meet healthcare's needs.

"People in storage are used to selling to IT groups," he says. "IT is about cost; they put the budget in and get it approved. The focus is on selling a box, not a solution. On the clinical side, some nasty questions come up, like 'If I buy this year, what will happen in three years?' In three years, I can't say 'All my RAID's obsolete, I have to replace it and can't afford it.' There's a big opportunity for somebody in the industry to sell a solution that will last for years and years."

Few in the industry dispute that opportunity: Market research firm Frost & Sullivan says storage revenue in healthcare hit $845 million in 2004 and projects it to reach more than $1.3 billion in 2008 (see Report: HIPAA Helps Storage Sales).

The Cleveland Clinic is a prime example of how healthcare storage needs are surging. Cecil says his storage requirements expand by 2 Tbytes per week, and his departments already have 300 Tbytes online.What's causing this growth? Mostly new imaging technology, such as picture archiving communications systems (PACS). (See EMC Manages PACS, Patient Records Healthy for Storage and IBM Manages Medical Images.) PACS digitally store cardiology and radiology tests, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results, and other large files. Cecil says the clinic has 300 PACS workstations in radiology, 120 in cardiology, and 100 or so in other departments.

New technologies will further drive storage needs at the clinic. The radiology department is starting to implement multislice Computed Tomography (CT) scans. Multislice CTs allow faster brain scans and can focus on thinner slices of tissue than previous CTs. But one multislice CT exam could require up to 1 Gbyte of storage, whereas older CTs use between 10 Mbytes and 50 Mbytes. Ultrasound machines will soon go to 3D, more than doubling the data they require. And Cecil says the clinic is shifting to digital mammography, which alone could double the total data needs in radiology.

The clinic needs more than just a lot of storage to cope with all this. One challenge is that it keeps all of the images it stores for so long that the word "archive" is a misnomer, according to Cecil.

"We don't put data away; it's always online. When you talk about information lifecycle management, 'lifecycle' here is defined as 'forever.' "

So here's how ILM works, Cleveland Clinic-style: "Within 15 minutes of being created, patient data is in five places," Cecil says. Data goes from the terminal where it is originally entered, to the nearest workstation, to the distributed PACS server, then on to a Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) Content Infrastructure System, and finally to a Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) tape library. Then the data starts coming off systems in the same order. Within five days, the information is only on the Content Infrastructure System and tape. After a month, any record that hasn't been recently accessed comes off disk completely and resides only on tape.Sun launched its Content Infrastructure System late last year to help companies deal with regulatory compliance issues (see Sun, AXS-One Offer Compliance Appliance). The system uses Sun's SAM-FS file system to automatically archive files that meet specific conditions (see Sun Sings New Storage Song).

Reliability is another challenge. Cecil prefers Sun's fixed-content systems, linked to servers via Fibre Channel in distributed fashion, to a SAN. "We use Fibre Channel, but we don't use a SAN," he says. "We use a distributed architecture, so there's no single point of failure. A single point of failure can bring the hospital down. And SAN technology is not cost-effective." Ouch!

The Cleveland Clinic story shows how healthcare firms' storage network requirements can diverge from those of other organizations. Despite the challenges, though, storage companies are pursuing this vertical like kids chasing an ice cream truck. EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) have long targeted healthcare, and others are jumping in (see North Bronx Healthcare Network, Cancer Center Turns to NetApp, Deepfile Becomes StoredIQ, Dynamic Health picks Intransa, St. Vincent's Applies Joint Solution, and Hospital Goes With DataCore).

Recent announcements show that competition is heating up: HP isn't new to healthcare, but this month it is rolling out the HP Medical Archiving Solution to compete with Sun's Content Infrastructure System (see HP Intros Medical Solutions).

While vendors are listening to customers like Robert Cecil, it's not clear just how many will succeed in meeting their stringent and very specific requirements. Up to now, it seems there's been a communication gap: "The healthcare industry in general is a slow adopter," says Jeff Miller, HP's VP of worldwide health and education industries.Cecil, for one, doesn't agree. In his view, if companies aren't able to succeed in this burgeoning market, they have only themselves to blame.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch