Crunch Time

So when Mike Knocke joined the 38-bed hospital as CIO three years ago, the first thing he wanted to do was to remove or eliminate the DVD jukebox. “Moving to a disk-based backup solution was kind of a Holy Grail,” he recalls. But software-based versions of a spinning backup were expensive. “What you've got is a backup of your data that has to be restored because the data are compressed and in a small footprint. When you start putting in a client with a bunch of drives onsite and think about having a vault offsite, the price quickly goes to six figures,” he says.

Knocke opted for a two-tiered production SAN because the data are replicated in a format that does not require a restore, and he could save about 85 percent of the costs of acquiring a traditional backup solution, cutting his data storage expenditures from $100,000 to $15,000 for a backup server, tape drive, and software.

The SAN is scalable, so Knocke has no qualms about adding more storage. He may one day use a higher tier of storage for the fastest, most recent images. But, he says, “The groundwork and foundation are there. I don't have to worry about adding any functionality that I don't already have.”

Karen Sandrick is a Chicago-based freelance writer who writes frequently about diagnostic imaging topics. Healthcare Informatics 2010 August;27(8):16-18