Enterprise Data Management Solution for Healthcare Running on Sun Systems

BridgeHead Software is announcing the availability of HEAT (Healthcare Enterprise Archive Topology), a set of intelligent solutions for cost-effective long-term retention and compliant management of healthcare data.

"Many healthcare organisations are struggling with the challenges of data management. Explosive data growth is rapidly consuming expensive storage resources and administrator time, but that is only part of the problem," said Tony Cotterill, CEO of BridgeHead Software. "Data silos within the healthcare organisation not only make inefficient use of valuable storage assets but also inhibit IT’s ability to provide added value to the business. When used in combination with HEAT, BridgeHead’s Healthcare Data Management software enables the IT department to solve many of the operational needs of their healthcare professional users. The solution not only reduces storage costs by automatically transferring data between storage tiers as well as compressing and de-duplicating the data, it is designed with healthcare in mind. It supports and indexes DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) data from any source; it also enables healthcare organisations to cost effectively manage scanned patient documents, which is becoming one of the biggest storage headaches for healthcare IT departments."

HEAT comes in three bundles which are available to suit the specific requirements of small, medium and large healthcare organisations. It consists of three tiers of storage, a Sun Fire X4240 server running Windows, a Sun Fire X4540 server and a Sun StorageTek L500 Tape Library integrated with and managed by BridgeHead’s Enterprise Data Archive (EDA) software. This close integration of software and hardware means that compliance concerns can be met but also the solution is self protecting ‘out of the box’ as it automatically protects and backs up the archived data and meta data.

It is important that clinicians and hospital administrators can access any archived data, including files, scanned patient records and DICOM data, at any time – they need not even know it has been archived. And because data is indexed and catalogued by the bundled software, there is now an additional search facility to locate specific files. And all that is in addition to the reduced storage costs, because expensive primary storage is now reserved for current data which needs to be more readily available, while older data is retained in the bundled Storage Server and tape archive where it is de-duplicated, compressed and encrypted. Focusing on the reduction in Total Cost of Ownership, the effects of moving vast quantities of data to a system that is self protecting will have a massive positive effect on an organisation’s backup infrastructure and costs.

"The BridgeHead Software solution running on Sun systems can be instrumental in lowering the Total Cost of Ownership of a hospital’s mission critical data," said Joerg Schwarz, director of global healthcare and life sciences at Sun Microsystems. "By combining Sun server and storage products, which are widely used in healthcare environments, with archiving software from BridgeHead, healthcare customers have available a mix of tried and tested technologies to help them better address their data management and integration challenges."