Open, Standards Based Fixed-Content Storage Solution Enables Healthcare Providers
To Share Images Between Numerous Applications, Workstations and Modalities
Vancouver, BC – May 21, 2004 - Bycast Inc., the leading provider of grid-powered storage solutions, today announced the general availability of Bycast StorageGRID™ 5.0. Featuring important capabilities for the healthcare industry, Bycast StorageGRID delivers a high performance fixed content storage solution based on a grid-computing architecture. It enables hospitals and healthcare networks to securely store and efficiently transmit diagnostic images and documents within the enterprise and across multi-site facilities.
In this new version, Bycast StorageGRID 5.0 introduces the FileSystem Gateway which exposes the StorageGRID as a virtual CIFS (Windows) or NFS (Unix/Linux) file system. This allows any type of fixed content, such as lab results, doctors notes, audio, video and diagnostic images, to be stored on the StorageGRID with the same scalability, reliability and speed that has always been available for native DICOM files. Furthermore, the FileSystem Gateway is content-aware and will intelligently process DICOM and other standard file formats. This standards-based approach significantly increases the openness of medical image near-line storage and archive systems and enables the sharing of imaging studies between numerous applications. Specifically, all Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) can seamlessly store and retrieve images on the StorageGRID without the use of proprietary APIs. This offers hospitals, healthcare networks and imaging centers significant business continuity protection and empowers healthcare providers to develop a best-of-breed diagnostic imaging platform based on industry standards.
“The goal of this new release is to help healthcare providers improve their operational effectiveness by enabling enterprise-wide sharing and accessibility to medical images and documents,” said Dr. Moe Kermani, President and CEO of Bycast. “The benefits are especially compelling for large healthcare networks that would like to share all forms of fixed-content between facilities and data centers spread throughout a large region.”
Bycast StorageGRID 5.0 enables healthcare organizations to address key industry IT challenges such as the cost-effective storage of rapidly growing volumes of medical images, business continuity, HIPAA compliance. Resolving these IT and business challenges will help improve the quality of patient care and effectiveness of the scarce specialist resources such as radiologists and cardiologists.
Cost-Effective Storage of Rapidly Growing Volumes of Medical Images
Bycast StorageGRID solutions combine the power of grid-computing with intelligent information lifecycle management to optimize petabyte-scale archives of fixed content data. Bycast StorageGRID accommodates all storage hardware including tapes, allowing direct alignment of storage costs and value of data. Capacity, performance and geographic footprint of the grid are increased by adding new nodes without impacting users. As nodes are added, the StorageGRID continues to present itself as one large virtual computing system. The StorageGRID will automatically re-optimize the environment to take advantage of the new resources. Furthermore, healthcare providers can set their own business rules that dictate the storage retention policies including the number of replicas, the location of the replicas, the storage media and the retention period. These sophisticated business rules can be based on any image attribute contained in the DICOM meta-data including modality, body part, time and date. Using these business rules, the StorageGRID will store and pro-actively move data around the grid to deliver a cost-effective, HIPAA compliant near-line storage and archive solution. This content-aware approach to information lifecycle management can deliver dramatic cost savings and optimize performance of petabyte-scale archives.
Business Continuity
Bycast StorageGRID solutions are based on a fault tolerant, self-healing architecture that is resilient to disruption because it has no single point of failure. The Bycast StorageGRID solution uses real-time data replication combined with business rules driven replica management to distribute data across the StorageGRID. This rules based approach allows hospitals to control the geographic location and number of replicas to achieve their desired level of redundancy. In the event of a failure, image storage and access requests are transparently re-routed to optimal resources and the grid will self-heal by automatically creating new replicas to restore the level of resiliency. This business continuity and disaster recovery architecture can be achieved using hospitals existing WAN infrastructure. The real-time streaming capabilities and intelligent resource management of Bycast StorageGRID allows for fast transfer of images between distant facilities.
HIPAA Compliance
With Bycast StorageGRID, both near-line and archival storage of diagnostic images are ready to meet the demanding HIPAA regulations which specify record availability, integrity, authenticity, retention period and system auditability. To meet content integrity and authenticity requirements, Bycast StorageGRID uses advanced cryptography techniques and certified digital signatures.
About Bycast
Bycast Inc. is the standard in high performance storage software solutions based on the next generation of grid computing technology. The Bycast StorageGRID™ solution combines the power of grid computing with intelligent information lifecycle management to optimize petabyte-scale archives of fixed content data. Healthcare providers can leverage Bycast software solutions to securely store and efficiently transmit diagnostic images and documents within the enterprise or across multi-site facilities. Bycast solutions have been deployed at leading healthcare institutions including the British Columbia Cancer Agency. Bycast Inc. is a privately held company located in Vancouver, BC, Canada and is on the Web at www.bycast.com
Media Contact
Deanne Farrar
Bycast Inc.
Tel.: (416) 485-8782
email: dfarrar@bycast.com
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