Our Storage Growth

I was recently asked to describe our clinical storage growth.

*In 2009, we consumed 12 Terabytes for clinical image storage and 3 Terabytes for non-image clinical storage

*This storage is also replicated in our disaster recover data center

*Our growth rate is approximate 25% per year

*We started 2010 with 175 Terabytes of storage

*We've used electronic records since 1977

*We have approximately 60,000 inpatient hospitalizations per year

*We have approximately 250,000 active patients

*If you divide our 2009 consumption (15 Terabytes total) by our total number of active patients (250,000), you get 60 megabytes/patient/year as the rough of amount of storage to be provisioned. To my knowledge, I've not heard of an industry statistic for Average Storage Annually per Patient, so we'll need to create a catchy name for this - the ASAP rate. You heard it here first.

Our infrastructure includes EMC Atmos NAS, Clariion NAS, and Clariion SAN. We use Data Domain for data deplication/compression archiving and F5/Acopia for storage virtualization. The infrastructure is designed and maintained by 1 full time Storage Architect and several part time support engineers who together constitute about 1 FTE.

As you can see medical images are the major element of our storage growth. We have several strategies to manage image storage growth including

*Using a centralized image management infrastructure with tiered storage for short term cache, long term cache and archiving. Our enterprise image management steering committee ensures strong governance and minimizes the spread of mini-PACS and departmental solutions.

*Partnering with GE, EMC and F5 we've created a private cloud of archival storage

*Partnering with Symantec, we've developed a cloud-based community image sharing solution that does not require local storage to exchange images among our affiliated clinicians. More on that tomorrow from HIMSS.

Speaking of HIMSS, I'll arrive in Atlanta on Monday night at 10pm, do a Standards Town Hall keynote from 8:30am-9:30am, attend a series of private meetings until 3:30pm, and then join the Meet the Bloggers event from 3:30pm-4:30pm. Feel free to drop by and say hello. I'm flying from Atlanta to Tokyo at 7pm, so my stay at HIMSS this year will be abbreviated.