In most implementation of PACS (be it Radiology, Cardiology or any other variant), the inclusion of storage subsystems is only necessary, afterall, archiving is one of the main motivation for implmenting a PACS.
Part of my job includes solution design for potential adopters of my product (cardiology informatics), this includes workflow and operational analysis, system integration etc etc and storage is a huge component.
Storage comes in many forms, NAS, SAN, CAS, Tape and how they are implemented (IP or Fibre, Virtusalisation, how they replicate) can be extremely interesting and confusing as no one specific product suits all users (thats why we need solutions architects 🙂 )
Anyway, in order to provide a greater range of choices to my adopters, I made a visit to Hitachi Data Systems to further understand their offerings. The session turns out pretty fruitful as it was a one to one ‘tutorial’ and I got tons of data sheets that I got to review before attempting to determine if those offerings will be ‘suitable’ in our (many) solutions.
Given that storage takes a big part of the purchase price that customers pay, I think it is only fair that they get something that not only suit their requirements but also future growth (or even consolidation of their exisiting / future storage – it helps in their DR/BCP design).
Have you thought about storage when you bought your PACS and how it affects your enterprise’s infrastructure?
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 