Scalable Infrastructure

A long-term customer collaboration to create an infinitely scalable, cost effective infrastructure platform for storing and searching petabytes of imaging data.

The Customer Problem

Cost effectively store, manage and secure billions of medical images.

Our very first customer enlisted our help in creating a cloud based medical imaging system that would provide healthcare systems, doctors, and patients with a global repository for all their medical images. It would provide secure sharing, collaboration, and storage of every patient's imaging history from dental records to MRIs. The system needed to be infinitely scalable, highly accessible, and cost effective.

Our Solution

The basis of our solution was to automatically replicate three copies of every image; each in distinct geographies. After a configurable time period, older images were automatically migrated from file-based storage to object based storage on disk arrays that automatically spun down to conserve power and cooling resources.

The applications that interfaced study management and security with care providers and patients were fully virtualized using open source XenServer that dramatically reduced customer licensing costs.

In its initial deployment, we had an interesting experience with a particular computer malware called Cryptolocker. This so called "ransom-ware" infected some physician PCs, encrypted their imaging data, and demanded that a ransom be paid to unlock it. No need. We simply used the snapshot functionality provided by our data storage solution to revert the malware encrypted data back to a point in time prior to encryption thereby completely defeating Cryptolocker.

This system is quickly approaching eight petabytes of imaging data at a major healthcare facility in Maryland. We recently added our data analytics to provide a natural language search interface to the now nearly 50 terabytes of high value metadata extracted from the images.