Caringo provides rock solid Object Storage

Premier Physician Services, one of the largest, most respected providers of healthcare services in the greater Midwest, has implemented a CAStor®-based solution to provide immutable object storage with definable retention periods for millions of medical document images used by physicians and hospitals to provide emergency care services.

Premier offers a medical document archiving solution that enables storage and access to medical charts used during the medical coding and billing process. Dissatisfied with the inability of EMC Centera’s integration into its workflow, the level of support EMC provided and the ongoing maintenance costs associated with the solution, Premier turned to Caringo’s object storage to protect its mission-critical data from failure and disaster.

“For us, immutable object storage with definable retention periods is the key,” said Steve Brown, Director of IT for Premier. “We rely on immutable object storage to protect against accidental file deletion and file corruption instead of regular incremental backups. Caringo performance matched or exceeded performance of the existing EMC system while providing benefits of price, relatively simple setup, great support, the flexibility to use our own hardware, simplicity of HTTP access, and the ability to failover to the DR cluster in the event of production failure.”

Premier’s production solution combines Caringo software, Coraid hardware, Eldos callback file system SDK and custom software. Caringo’s CAStor, Cluster Services Node and Content Router are used in a two-cluster configuration – one for production and one for disaster recovery. The nodes are connected via Coraid’s ATA over Ethernet (AoE). Retention periods for the roughly 15 million TIFF images currently stored are set by Premier’s imaging management software that adds encryption, file caching and security. CAStor then automatically manages the file retention period based on set policies.