Wednesday, May 9, 2007
What is your Disaster Recovery Solution?
Exactly what disaster do you want to recover from? The most common concern is the loss of a RAID cache. Most medical imaging departments have a plan in place to recover lost image data. At the very least, they have written a copy of the data to a Digital Tape cartridge and stashed that copy off-site in a relatively secure location. Taken one step further, they are managing the second copy on a separate remote storage solution; near-line tape, MOD, CD/DVD; or even on-line RAID. That's great, they have the means to replace their primary copy of the image data, should their primary system suffer a "disaster".
But that second copy of their data is most likely an exact duplicate of the same file format stored on their primary PACS archive. They have two copies of the exact same file. At first glance that seems like a solid plan. But is it?
Most current PACS, radiology or cardiology, are less than 100% pure DICOM-conformant. There is always something special, unique, proprietary about how they create or store the data objects. Just enough to make it difficult to change vendors. In effect, this is the essence of vendor lock.
Somewhere in the future, a Health System is going to want to replace an incumbent PACS with a different PACS. That is going to require an expensive and time-consuming data migration. Even if you know this, and actually have the wherewithal to plan for this and accurately budget for this, this could be considered something of a Disaster.
So here is something to consider. Given that you are mandated by HIPAA to create a reasonable Disaster Recovery solution, why make that second copy a duplicate of the semi, not really 100% DICOM-compliant version of the study data created by your existing PACS? Why not avoid the "disaster" of data migration and make that second copy a 100% DICOM-conformant copy of your study data? What I am suggesting is that you redirect your Disaster Recovery dollars into an second, standalone "archive" solution, most likely from a different vendor, who can demonstrate/guarantee that this second copy is accessible to both the current PACS and the next PACS, and the one after that. There would be no need to migrate the data, when you change PACS!
Make your Disaster Recovery solution a PACS-neutral solution, and avoid the very predictable disaster of data migration.
Posted on 9:51:10 PM comment []
