IBM Intros Medical Grid

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- At the American Telemedicine Association show today, IBM announced its new Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), a cross-IBM offering comprised of storage, software, servers and services.

The GMAS solution provides hospitals, clinics, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies with a multi-tier, multi-application and multi-site enterprise storage archive for delivering medical images, patient records and other critical healthcare reference information on demand.

The need to retain massive volumes of business critical fixed-content data for long periods of time is presenting new data and storage management challenges for health care organizations. Users continue to demand fast performance as well as higher and broader availability of patient records and medical images. Massive data volumes combined with long retention periods require storage administrators to deliver a cost effective storage strategy that meets the users needs, protects valuable data, scales on demand, simplifies data migration and automates recovery both planned and unplanned downtime.

“With increasing advances in medicine coupled with a longer-living population, healthcare organizations are increasingly embracing new technology that puts the patient in the center of the delivery model and drives innovation to increase the quality of patient care,” said Hernan Vega, Vice President, Healthcare and Life Sciences, IBM Systems and Technology Group “IBM GMAS is a great example of how advanced storage technologies, virtualization and grid computing can improve the way hospitals access, store and manage their critical patient data over time.”

IBM Corp.