Scality claims big savings for hospital data storage

Object storage supplier Scality says five healthcare customers each save an average $270,000 per PB over three years compared to their previous storage, and get data 52 per cent faster.

Applications include imaging, patient electronic health records, genomics sequencers, Biomedical, CCTV, EMR, radiology and accounting.

Data growth is a big issue for hospitals, Paul Speciale, Scality chief product officer, writes. “If we look at medium-to-large hospitals (those over 250 patient beds, which is common in cities with 100,000 people), in most cases there is now a petabyte scale data problem – medical image storage is becoming a much more prominent part of budgets.”

Scality has sponsored an IDC report to help persuade other healthcare customers to save money by using its RING software.

IDC interviewed five Scality customers – four hospital groups and a genomics research institution, -with an average of 2.7PB of data in their Scality RING object storage. A chart in the report shows the average costs for the Scality system and the customers’ equivalent storage systems not using Scality. Costs are split into initial and ongoing costs for storage hardware and software:

The Scality cost saving is 28 per cent, equating to $90,000 per PB per year or $90 per terabyte per year. Also, customers required 46 per cent less staff time such as scalability and ease of integration with other systems. One interviewee said: “Scality does not require a lot of management effort, unlike a SAN. Scality has allowed us to consolidate our storage arrays, which reduced the heterogeneous systems to manage a unified backup system.”

Scality numbers as customers more than 40 hospitals, hospital systems and genomics research institutions worldwide.