PACStore is an archiving product that helps healthcare organizations reduce the accelerating storage hardware and management burden imposed by the long term retention and protection of PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) medical image data.

The system automatically copies and repositions data based on IT policies to a full range of secondary storage targets. PACStore lets IT define and enforce unlimited rules for any medical image data set to ensure that:
1) primary disk is optimally utilized,
2) secondary copies of images exist on any combination of media and at multiple locations in compliance with internal and external data availability standards, and
3) archived images are accessible either transparently or “actively” depending on end-user and application needs.

PACStore effectively unifies PACS data by enabling clinicians to search across stored medical images from different proprietary PACS systems. It does this through a search facility based on the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard used by most PACS vendors.

PACStore is storage agnostic, providing unlimited flexibility for selecting and deploying different types of storage media throughout the evolution of your data lifecycle management strategy. Storage costs are reduced as PACStore automatically moves data onto the appropriate storage media based on how available it needs to be. The most current, active PACS image data stays on the most highly available primary storage, while static data, which is viewed less frequently, is moved to alternative, lower cost media in line with compliance and protection requirements.

Summary of Advantages over other HSM products

The PACStore policy engine drives a more granular and sophisticated range of actions including:

• Scanning and reporting across the file system.
• Deleting unwanted images according to predefined policy.
• Archiving images to secondary storage for data protection and compliance purposes, without modifying source copy.
• “Active archiving” of images from primary storage to secondary storage, providing a full index online for easy user access.
• Comprehensive DICOM indexing provides powerful search capabilities across disparate imaging systems.
• Transparent archiving through stubbing of images from primary storage, freeing up expensive primary storage capacity while maintaining normal end-user and application access to data.
• Managing image retention periods, protecting data from unauthorized access, and complete auditing of all image access and movement (“compliant archive”).
• Automating end-user defined actions such as in-place compression.
• Automatic or manual operation.

PACStore adds robustness to the storage management infrastructure. Its integration into the BridgeHead EDM platform can greatly reduce the extent to which resource intensive backup and replication procedures are run for disaster recovery and business continuance requirements.  Unlike HSM products where the use of stubbing can increase the possibility of data loss, PACStore also ensures data integrity by maintaining complete meta-data records in its underlying database, tracking all data it has copied or re-positioned to secondary storage, and providing easy querying of its archive contents.

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