IBM Consolidates Health Archives

May 22, 2007: IBM has announced its latest Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS) at this week’s Telemedicine Association show in the US, promising a multi-tier, multi-application and multi-site enterprise storage archive for delivering medical images, patient records and other critical health care reference information on demand.

The company says that the health care industry is burdened by the need to retain massive amounts of critical data for long periods, leading to significant storage management challenges in an industry where performance and broad availability is paramount.

“With mounting advances in medicine coupled with a longer-living population, health care organisations are increasingly embracing new technology that puts the patient in the centre of the delivery model and drives innovation to increase the quality of patient care,” said Hernan Vega, vice president of health care and life sciences in the IBM Systems and Technology Group. “IBM GMAS is a great example of how advanced storage technologies, virtualisation and grid computing can improve the way hospitals access, store and manage their critical patient data over time.”

IBM says GMAS uses a combination of virtualisation, automation and grid technologies to enable fast and secure access to archived medical information while delivering “real-time failover and self-healing capabilities”. IBM says the software also includes information lifecycle management and advanced data protection functions.

GMAS presents itself to enterprise applications as a single storage system that can aggregate underlying storage silos into a single enterprise storage pool – handy if silos are spread across multiple facilities.

IBM says GMAS will be generally available on June 1, 2007.

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