Healthcare Provider Premier Physician Services Relies on Caringo CAStor

Caringo
Inc. announced that Premier
Physician Services, a large provider of healthcare services in
the greater Midwest, has implemented a CAStor-based solution to
provide immutable object storage with definable retention periods for medical
document images used by physicians and hospitals to provide emergency care
services.

Premier offers a medical document archiving
solution that enables storage and access to medical charts used during the
medical coding and billing process. Dissatisfied with the inability of EMC
Centera‘s integration into its workflow, the level of support EMC provided and
the ongoing maintenance costs associated with the solution, Premier turned to this
solution to protect its data from failure and disaster.

"For us, immutable object storage with definable retention periods is the
key," said Steve Brown, director of IT, Premier.  "We rely on immutable object storage to
protect against accidental file deletion and file corruption instead of regular
incremental backups. Caringo performance matched or exceeded performance of the
existing EMC system while providing benefits of price, relatively simple setup,
great support, the flexibility to use our own hardware, simplicity of HTTP
access, and the ability to failover to the DR cluster in the event of
production failure."

The production solution combines Caringo
software, Coraid, Inc.‘s hardware, Eldos callback file system SDK and custom software. 

The CAStor, Cluster Services Node and Content Router solutions are used
in a two-cluster configuration – one for production and one for DR. The
nodes are connected via Coraid’s ATA over Ethernet. Retention periods for
the roughly 15 million TIFF images stored are set by Premier’s imaging
management software that adds encryption, file caching and security. It
then automatically manages the file retention period based on set policies.