Store more: data storage trends

Health Management Technology, Sept, 1997 by Jim Evans

Many of the fundamental issuing regarding storage remain the same as in the past, says Reed. Those issues are: * Standardized nomenclature. Despite the plethora of medical coding schemes available, there is little continuity in terms of standardized nomenclature or record content. * Orientation of data. Data is collected for one purpose but is used for other purposes. However, its `new' uses are usually fraught with data integrity issues as the data often lacks the specificity for new purposes. * Quantity and retention of data. Systems have not yet found convenient vehicles to migrate data between online and offline storage. * Transaction-based versus query-based systems. Most systems and their associated data storage mechanisms are optimized for transaction throughput. "As we attempt to use those same data structures for random, ad-hoc queries, either retrieval is horrendous, transaction processing suffers, or both," says Reed.

"At the core, I believe, is understanding the difference between data and information and architecting our data structures and systems to deal with the nuances of each," he says.

In the current technical environment, Reed sees three technologies that offer promise -- and concern.

Image and video will increasingly become a data storage challenge. "We do need to migrate to a paperless society, however, it will not all be `data' oriented," he says. "Images will still exist, only they need to be digitized and stored for access purposes."

Wireless technologies will effect both data acquisition and retrieval. And data transformation management systems -- intelligent interface engines -- which not only easily move and transform data, but "cleans and scrubs" it as well.

Improvements in storage

As the price for memory has dropped, the reliability of computers has increased. The last remaining moving part is the disk drive; everything else is solid state. And with fewer chips needed, Klein says, "Today's computers are far more reliable than those manufactured seven to 10 years ago."

As the amount of health care data to be stored on disk drives increased, RAID technology -- redundant arrays of inexpensive disks -- has played a major role in moving more clinical information to the digital environment.

"The health care industry has made enormous strides in data availability with the advent of RAID systems," says Robin Harris, Sun Microsystems' senior product manager. Still, he says, most organizations commonly use mirroring technology, in which one copy of the live data exists. This can sustain at least one significant failure, he says, but for mission-critical patient data, more safeguards need to be in place to ensure around-the-clock availability.

RAID disks, however, have a smart controller in front of a bank of multiple disk drives. If one fails, the system has enough redundancy to replace an entire disk drive and it goes right on working. "There's absolutely no excuse for mission-critical systems not having RAID technology," says Gartner Group's Klein.