Scale Computing for Healthcare

There's no margin for error in health care, which is why Scale Computing is the perfect solution for your needs. The full-featured functionality of ICOS delivers enterprise-class features typically found among systems that cost three to four times as much. With no single point of failure, an architecture that scales up, not out, zero data migration, and high performance delivery of image files, scans and sequential data, Scale's ICOS can keep your records safe and accessible.

Watch the video to hear neurologist and HIT advisor Dr. Todd Rowland explain why health care professionals should consider Scale Computing.

Healthcare’s extreme storage and data protection generates excessive amounts of data: medical records, images, hospital administration, and insurance documents to name just a few. In addition to extreme data growth, regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley mandate highly protected and highly available data. Couple these pressing needs with the cost of highly available and high-performance networked storage, and you have an overwhelming burden for IT and IT budgets in the healthcare industry.

Scale Computing steps in with Intelligent Clustered Operating System™ (ICOS) — highly scalable, highly available, and redundant grid storage for the healthcare industry. Scale's powerful yet affordable software creates next-generation grids for healthcare's extreme data and protection needs. ICOS' clustered architecture functions as an independently controlled mass data storage device. Storage nodes can act as a SAN, NAS or both, and cluster to form a high-performance grid-based storage system. Data protection works at the block-level for high-speed replication of even the largest image files. And all of this power and scalability comes with a low price tag because it uses commodity hardware.

Scale ICOS Benefits for Healthcare

• Powerful scalability. Extreme data growth and long data retention requirements characterize healthcare. ICOS clustered architecture enables IT to non-disruptively add new nodes at will, which seamlessly increases the capacity of the entire array.
• High availability. ICOS serves healthcare's high availability and security needs with data protection and redundant infrastructure. The storage system does not require expensive RAID technology because it mirrors, snapshots, and replicates within its node architecture. Each node is capable of replication and re-replicating as needed without the overhead or risk of a master node.
• Security and compliance. Mirroring, snapshots, and advanced replication keep the ICOS storage grid fully redundant and highly secure. This is particularly important for healthcare data storage, which must prevent data loss and corruption at all costs.

Healthcare IT departments face very difficult challenges. First, healthcare generates extreme data in terms of sheer file size and growing volumes of data. Second, healthcare data is heavily regulated so IT must be certain that critical data is highly protected and highly available at all times.

For example, a diagnostic technology called Multislice Computed Tomography enables exceptionally granular brain scans. But a single CT exam – just one – easily generates 1 gigabyte (GB) of storage. Multiply that by 1GB per patient, and IT is looking at some serious capacity needs for just one diagnostic tool. Add digital imaging, scanned X-rays, and 3-D models and you have overwhelming storage provisioning needs just for diagnostic data. Add to that large image files, medical records, case management records, hospital data, and insurance documents, and you have some extreme storage needs. On top of these capacity and performance issues, regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley require that all of this data be highly protected and highly available.

These scenarios can quickly overwhelm IT's resources and become nightmares for traditional storage systems. Investing in enterprise-class storage systems comes with high prices and ongoing maintenance costs. And even with all of this high-end storage, IT struggles to gain performance and provisioning control over the storage infrastructure.

Scale Computing Heals Healthcare

Scale Computing steps into this demanding situation with Intelligent Clustered Operating System (ICOS). ICOS is an extremely high performance but low-cost storage system that ideally suits healthcare's storage challenges.

Scale's powerful and highly affordable software runs on commodity hardware. Its architecture allows it to offer third generation storage clusters for healthcare's extreme storage needs – and at an exceptionally affordable price.

ICOS' clustered architecture functions as an independently controlled mass data storage device. Storage nodes can act as a SAN, NAS or both, and the nodes cluster to form a high performance grid-based storage system. Mirroring, snapshots and replication are native to the ICOS and data protection works at the block-level to protect even the largest healthcare image files. And all of this enterprise power and scalability comes with an extremely affordable price.

Scale Benefits Healthcare

• Powerful but simplified administration. Simplified storage management is a necessity for relieving heavy storage management overhead. Administrators may operate the ICOS management console from any node for control and flexibility. The streamlined GUI interface simplifies management tasks across the entire cluster.
• Smooth scalability of capacity, performance and throughput. Healthcare is characterized by excessive data growth and long data retention requirements. ICOS clustered architecture lets IT easily add new nodes at will without downing the system or migrating data to the new node. Since storage processing is active-active, data never stalls at the storage controller level and both performance and throughput scale along with capacity.
• Highly available with no single point of failure. Scale ICOS complies with HIPAA regulations regarding data availability for disaster recovery and business continuity. Scale's high availability features are extremely cost-effective because they do not require expensive RAID technology. ICOS natively mirrors, snapshots, and replicates within its own architecture. Each node is capable of replicating and re-replicating without the management overhead of a master node. And no master node means there is no single point of failure.
• Fast performance and throughput. Scale can handle demanding healthcare data including very large files and high volumes of smaller files. ICOS allows multiple storage protocols like CIFS, NFS and iSCSI to run at the same time, effectively turning the storage system into a SAN and a NAS. This enables storage administrators to assign the optimum storage type to incoming data such as block-based storage for large digital X-rays and file-based storage for frequently accessed hospital records. Growing data volumes do not impact performance or throughput since these characteristics scale with additional nodes.