COMPANY - Digital Archiving Clients - CHUM Hospital

With the smartDAX DVD Archive Solutions, finally we can avoid the time-consuming process of rewinding (back-up) tape when retrieving archived data.
Dr. Beaudoin, physicist, Centre Hospitalier de l´Université de Montréal.

The institute
The Centre Hospitalier de l´Université de Montréal (CHUM) is an internationally renowed Canadian healthcare centre and the largest university teaching hospital in Eastern Canada.  It provides specialized and sub-specialized services to a regional and supra-regional clientele. Within its more immediate coverage area, it also offers general and specialized hospital care and services. All of these services contribute to teaching, research and the assessment of technologies as well as healthcare methodologies. Hôtel-Dieu, Hôpital Notre-Dame and Hôpital Saint-Luc merged in 1996 to form the CHUM, which now counts 10,000 employees, 1000 physicians and 800 volunteers who render services to more than 500,000 patients each year.

The challenge
The CHUM’s research centre employs more than 300 researchers who work in various fields to improve the public’s well being. The research departments of CHUM were in need of setting up well structured digital archiving systems that allowed them to archive several types of data amongst which MR/CT scans, ultrasounds and X-rays.  These archiving systems should allow them to obtain quick and easy access to the archived data. Furthermore it was imperative that they provided a straightforward integration in their existing IT infrastructure which required little maintenance and IT-management efforts as the CHUM’s imaging research group does not have a big IT staff at its disposal. Due to medical legislative constraints their data has to be archived in WORM format (Write Once, Read Many) and has to be retrievable for a period of 25 years which in turn demands a durable and reliable solution.

The solution
The SmartDAX archiving solutions permit any type of data to be archived on them and are ideal for creating digital libraries.  As the SmartDAX 700 solutions operate cross-platform and are network attached, the implementation of these devices into the UNIX network of CHUM went seamless. CHUM’s imaging research group already had the Central Test Node Dicom server from the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in place and the SmartDAX 700 appliances were connected to create a complete digital archiving system. Easy access is rooted in the DAXfs (file system) software that enables the digital archives to be seen as an extra drive letter on the network and allows searching for data in the same manner.  DVD archiving technology represents a fast and reliable solution compared to tape and RAID as the data to be retrieved is only a “DVD away” and this technology is also less susceptible to tear and wear, harmful influences of viruses and new technological developments.  Longevity of the data is guaranteed on a standardized consumer level medium. Archiving all their medical data in WORM format is ensured by the DVD-R technology.  CHUM also makes use of the mirroring possibility which implies that a 2nd (DVD) copy of the data is produced automatically which is stored off-site for disaster recovery purposes.