Recently, we've seen the emergence of new storage architectures emphasizing software-based systems that provide high performance, scalability and resiliency by spreading data, file systems and operating systems across distributed infrastructure. While this approach is not generally being implemented for large transaction processing applications, within unstructured content applications it is rapidly gaining popularity.
IBM's recent announcement of its Grid Access Manager based on Bycast technology is an excellent example of this technique as applied to medical imaging and records retention. Customers in the medical industry that want to implement large imaging, records retention and archiving solutions are seeing Bycast emerge as an innovator and key technology provider, partnering with the likes of IBM as well as HP. IBM's announcement will serve to provide further credibility to this market offering users a services-led solution that appears to be competitive and compelling.
Customers with scale will likely be able to take advantage of this solution, finding it easier to automate disaster recovery and backup relative to more traditional, monolithic storage approaches. Smaller customers however must weigh the costs of adopting a turnkey solution with a heavy services emphasis against the incremental benefits.
Action Item: IT organizations within the medical community should begin to aggressively investigate solutions like IBM's Grid Access Manager and understand the implications of this type of architecture on mid-to-long term image and records retention strategies. However, users should not expect nor assume this specific solution will be leverageable to address more generalized storage any time soon.
Footnotes: