In the healthcare sector, the ever-advancing technology of imaging procedures always causes data explosion. In order to deal with this challenge on a permanent basis, Karlsruhe City Hospital was looking for a flexible and scalable archiving software.
As a hospital with maximum care, Karlsruhe City Hospital offers nearly all medical disciplines on its premises. The hospital provides its 54,000 inpatients and 197,000 outpatients per year with high-quality diagnostic and treatment services using leading-edge technology. The number of patients the hospital treats grows every year – and also the amount of data.
The hospital currently anticipates rapid data growth per year. The key driver for this is the continuing development of devices for cross-sectional imaging (CT, MR, ultrasonography etc.). Another factor contributing to the increase in data volume is the post-processing of image data.
X-ray and radiation protection regulations require a retention period of at least ten years – in some cases even longer – for diagnostic data and data associated with medical treatment.
To archive the data in compliance with legal requirements, the clinic's IT department decided in 2013 to implement the vendor-independent and virtualizable archiving middleware iCAS from iTernity. This solution replaced the previously used proprietary EMC Centera system appliance, which could no longer meet the requirements for flexibility, scalability, and independence due to its rigid design.
When the existing archiving infrastructure needed modernization in 2022, the clinic's IT department switched to the managed storage platform iCAS FS from iTernity. The clinic's IT sees the primary advantage of the archiving platform in its maximum scalability, which allows for optimal handling of unpredictable data growth.
iCAS FS offers the clinic important advantages:
In addition to expanding into a clinic-wide central archive and integrating pathology, the hospital views iCAS FS as a future component of its overall backup strategy, as iCAS FS can be used not only for data archiving but also for backup storage.
