IBM to provide infrastructure essentials for largest medical images cloud in U.S. 

InSite One, Inc., the largest cloud provider for medical image data archiving, storage, and disaster-recovery solutions in the U.S., today announced it has chosen IBM (NYSE: IBM) technologies to help hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies store and manage massive increases in medical imaging data. InSite One has chosen IBM as the vendor of choice for its primary datacenter expansion and storage device upgrades. 

Under terms of the agreement, InSite One is purchasing IBM storage and servers in its primary data center in Connecticut. Over the next three-to-five years InSite One will also replace its existing storage and servers. The total amount of storage purchased will exceed 1 petabyte.  The data center will use IBM System x Servers and DS3200 Storage systems. 

IBM and InSite One will also collaborate on client enterprise storage and archiving opportunities where InSite One sells its services and IBM sells its storage and  infrastructure solutions.  The total value of the agreement is in excess of $15 million. 

The world’s information infrastructure will soon be unable to handle the demand now being asked of it by the healthcare industry and others, including finance, retail and telecommunications.  With the emergence of cloud computing – a model for delivering and consuming IT capabilities as a service – healthcare and other enterprises can gain competitive advantage through economies of scale in archiving, compliance, security and privacy, resiliency, systems integration and management of huge, constantly increasing amounts of data.  

InSite One and IBM are well positioned to help healthcare and life sciences organizations manage the rapid growth in medical imaging data with technology that is scalable, secure and interoperable. Both companies support intelligent, open-standards-based technology that adheres to interoperable document sharing protocols endorsed by leading standards organizations such as DICOM, HL7, CIFS and XDS.  InSite One’s InDex® storage and content management services feature an on-demand repository that ensures rapid retrieval of clinical information for healthcare and life-sciences enterprises.  The services span the legally required lifetimes of all images and provide a tamper-proof, HIPAA compliant environment. 

Currently, the InDex Archive is averaging 15 terabytes of digital medical data on a weekly basis, with a total of more than 2.3 billion image objects, representing five percent of the U.S. patient population.  This makes InDex the largest single medical storage service in the industry, with two petabytes of medical imaging date managed by InSite One. 

“IBM delivers the storage capability and infrastructure that are necessary for the virtualization of clients’ datacenters,” said Paul Dandrow, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of InSite One. “IBM’s innovative technology combined with our InDex solutions allows InSite One to build datacenters that can seamlessly integrate new medical imaging innovations and constantly scale to accommodate future business demands.” 

The technologies supporting cloud computing – virtualization, automation, Web-delivered services, open standards and Internet-scale computing – are some of IBM’s core capabilities. IBM runs more data centers than any other company in the world, and has strengthened its capabilities over recent years through acquisitions and first-of-a-kind projects with clients in its 13 cloud computing centers. 

IBM and InSite One have already begun to collaborate on client enterprise storage requirements, where managed solutions can provide cost effective alternatives that address the need for data sharing and long-term retention and data protection.  Available now from InSite One and IBM, the enhanced, open, secure and interoperable data archiving, storage and disaster recovery solutions set themselves apart from the competition. 

The ability to share medical images on open-standards based infrastructure from IBM helps companies to preserve the qualities that differentiate their products and services while increasing their ability to share the value of their data over interoperable delivery platforms.  Further, InSite One and IBM offerings are more cost effective for clients: they are based on the life of each individual radiology study as compared to per-gigabyte charges demanded by many competitors. 

“Our collaboration with InSite One will lift the growing, cost-intensive burden of managing massively data-intensive medical image archives from the hospitals, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies,” said Dan Pelino, General Manager, IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry.  “The security and scalability of the open, advanced solutions offered by InSite One and IBM allows customers to grow beyond their walls and achieve their goals with expanded medical imaging capabilities and reduced operational and financial responsibilities for maintaining such data.”

Courtesy of IBM