Digital Image Storage System

With this state-of-the-art installation, the physicians and staff of Manhattan Diagnostic Radiology (MDR; New York, NY, USA), a U.S. diagnostic radiology group, has selected Nexsan's (Woodland Hills, CA, USA) highly scalable and high-availability SATABeast as primary storage for its busy radiology practice.

Information technology (IT) director Joseph Gomez was challenged to support the busy practice, which generates an average of one hundred gigabytes of data per week. MDR also uses several custom applications to access diagnostic studies, made up of hundreds of images each that are very transaction-intensive. The program processes standardized digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) images using a buffer system and read-ahead processes that are particularly demanding on the storage arrays. In addition to the SATABeast supporting ongoing business demands, MDR is also simultaneously migrating 200,000 images per day onto the SATABeast from legacy DVD picture archiving communications system (PACS) systems.

MDR is in the process of expanding its facilities to include a new dedicated PET/CT and Nuclear Medicine Division, and will be purchasing additional SATABeasts as dedicated systems to support their Cardiovascular Diagnostic Imaging Division, specializing in 64-detector CT angiography, and their Referring Physicians Reference archive. The purchases have been facilitated by RADirect (Mahwah, NJ, USA), a value-added reseller (VAR) specializing in networking access equipment and storage networking systems.

SATABeast's novel combination of technologies provides excellent performance, reliability, and cost savings for primary and near-line storage, disk-to-disk backup, secondary storage, and fixed content archive applications. The system's novel design extends individual drive life and provides significant savings year over year, while its AutoMAID (massive array of idle disks) function allows SATABeast to place its disk drives into an idle state to conserve energy, yet provide near-instantaneous access to data.



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