Saying good by to data loss
BY NETAPP
Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisana improves PACS image access with NetApp and Fujifilm Italia.
One of the oldest universities in Europe, the University of Pisa in Pisa, Italy, has a long-standing tradition of excellence in medical care. Its hospital, officially known as Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisana (
www.ao-pisa.toscana.it), provides healthcare services to residents of Pisa and is affiliated with a network of hospitals that serves the area vasta, or surrounding area, of approximately one million people.
The challenge
Storing, accessing, and archiving medical images related to radiology, cardiology, and other disciplines is one of the primary IT challenges facing healthcare organizations today. Medical image files are large and getting larger as new imaging modalities are introduced and higher resolutions become standard. The radiology department of the University of Pisa hospital performs hundreds of thousands of exams annually. Images associated with these exams must be retained and made available for fast access by doctors and technicians. Data loss is not an option, and any significant delay in image access can have a direct impact on patient care. Prior to 2008, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisana and 10 associated local hospitals maintained separate datastores at each location for picture archiving and communication system radiology images. Sharing images between hospital locations required physically transporting images on film or CD, which could take hours or even up to a day. A group of hospital engineers maintained the open-source PACS and associated SAN in Pisa, but, due to their other responsibilities, it was difficult to ensure that the system would be supported 24x7. Although the hospital kept a backup image archive for each modality, sporadic data loss often occurred in the central SAN archive, either due to electrical
failures or human error. When this happened, exams had to be reloaded from the modality level, which could take as long as two hours.
“In a clinical practice, two hours can be a very long time,” says Professor Davide Caramella, Radiology Director, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisana. “Technicians are justifiably breathing down your neck and saying they need the report, and you can only say, ‘Well, I have to reload the previous exam.’” Scaling storage capacity to keep pace with the PACS image archive - growing by 25TB a year in Pisa and twice that across the hospital network - was also a major challenge. “Our storage space was insufficient, and we were constantly adding more,” says Caramella. “To make matters worse, the engineers were not always available to respond immediately when we needed to add capacity, so we had to track them down.”
Because the PACS images were backed up manually to disk in Pisa and at each remote hospital location, data protection consumed a large amount of staff time and was vulnerable to human error. “We wanted a secure, reliable, scalable PACS solution that could be managed 24x7 without burdening our engineers,” says Caramella. “We also knew that this would be a requirement for the future, since new modalities are coming out very quickly. Also, one of our goals is to extend the PACS to our cardiology department as well, which will involve many, many more terabytes of image data.”
The solution Following a careful evaluation of PACS vendors, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Pisana decided to deploy Fujifilm Synapse, a managed global PACS solution that could serve all of its locations with one centrally administered system. Fujifilm Italia recommended NetApp virtualized storage because of its reliability and feature set, which would enable a more efficient approach to data protection and image sharing. Fujifilm engineers installed NetApp FAS2020 clusters as primary storage at each hospital to host the local PACS images, along with a NetApp FAS270 storage system in Pisa to host the hospital’s Oracle(r) Database. Block-level changes in the data are replicated over the hospital network’s WAN using NetApp SnapMirror software to a NetApp SnapVault backup repository residing on a NetApp FAS6030 storage system. This enables
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