ProStor Systems - A company shaping the future for storage and archiving

InfiniVault Family

Part Two of a two part series

Continuing my conversation with Frank Harbist of ProStor Systems, a transplanted bay area local that now heads up a Boulder, Colorado based company that is setting the benchmark for long term data storage solutions. Today, I will report the benefits that three industry sectors have derived from the decision of using the ProStor product offerings. One being the healthcare industry, another being government, and the last being the financial sector.

The President’s agenda as you may recall is the ability to expand technology in the field of medical record transfer for doctors and health facilities. HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountancy Act) in effect expands the Hippocratic Oath to the care of the patient’s medical records by protecting the patient’s privacy while ensuring that the medical information can be readily and accurately transported between healthcare providers. ProStor InfiniVault® has been implemented by a Veterans Administration facility, cardiology clinics, and hospitals across the country. A leading Bay Area medical transportation company uses the ProStor InfiniVault to properly retain their records and replicates the data between two major US cities to provide disaster protection for that information. ProStor InfiniVault also offers a DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) option for a healthcare facility to improve the portability of its diagnostic images. DICOM provides a standard method for the transmission of medical images and their associated information allowing radiologists from around the globe to access and read a patient’s scanned image regardless of which manufacturer’s equipment is used to conduct the diagnostic scan. This provides patients faster access to the best clinician to study their scan as well as ready access to second and third opinions when necessary. Since ProStor InfiniVault is an intelligent long-term storage solution, it is being used by healthcare facilities to replace obsolete deep archive technologies including tape and optical storage. The ProStor system automatically makes multiple copies on RDX® removable disk and encrypts the data allowing healthcare organizations to easily comply with the HIPAA rule to have a secure offsite copy. The highest level of data encryption on the RDX disk further protects the information should the disk become lost or stolen while being transported to or from the offsite data storage facility. To help store data in as small a space as possible, a 1TB RDX removable disk is about 1 inch high, 3 ½ inches wide, and 4 ½ inches long or about the size of two packs of playing cards side by side. For perspective, 100 1TB RDX cartridges can store 100,000 Multi-slice CT scans or 500,000 MRIs or 2,000,000 X-Rays.

Model 5 with RDX Technology

Another topic with today’s issues at hand is our carbon footprint. Energy management and conservation is paramount with ProStor’s design focus. Their ProStor InfiniVault and RDX docks use a unique storage cartridge enclosure employing 2.5” disk drive technology. The RDX cartridges and the ProStor InfiniVault system can be spun down to conserve power and reduce wear on the electro-mechanical parts, unlike traditional disk based systems that must keep the disk spindles spinning, which increases power usage and temperature, as well as adding to premature wear. The company notes a 30-year life for the RDX cartridge. A company only adds new disk when they need it and only the capacity they need at the best price point since it’s available from a variety of sources. Harbist calls this a “step-wise” growth approach to manage any end user’s data storage needs. State and local governments have found the power, cooling, and space conservation a great benefit to their operations. Since an RDX removable disk cost between $200 - $600, they are able to move what was once a major capital appropriation and expenditure to an operational expense. There is no longer a need to tie up budget dollars pre-purchasing storage capacity at an expensive price. In addition, power utilization goes way down because the disks “spin down” when not being used and are completely turned off when removed from the system. As an example, a large county in Wisconsin is replicating data between two sites to ensure disaster protection and to secure vital reports from the sheriff’s department and court system documents from the District Attorney. Even with taking advantage of the power savings, lower cost, and security of data, county workers needed to be able to store and retrieve these documents in a timely fashion. Harbist reports that they found with ProStor InfiniVault their image retrieval times shrank considerably to sub-two seconds, which is a dramatic improvement as compared to legacy optical and tape backup systems.

Finally, let’s discuss the even more monitoring and oversight of the financial system due to recent failures and illegal activity, and the requirements for secure financial data that transpire between institutions. ProStor InfiniVault keeps an audit trail log of every action taken on a file and includes information about the ingestion, every subsequent access, the cartridges and locations where the file resides, and the retention period and actions performed. The audit trail provides a complete chain-of-custody for all financial records that are archived. A Wall Street firm providing services for the equities trading market implemented a ProStor system in their operations to keep their data compliant with SEC rules. ProStor InfiniVault stores archived financial data in Write Once, Read Many (WORM) mode, both in the active archive and on the RDX removable cartridges. The hardware-enforced WORM on the cartridges ensures that the data cannot be altered or deleted until the retention period has expired. Additionally, a hash algorithm is performed on the data to protect unique content address that is used to verify that no data has been changed during any transmission or storage operation. In the end, the Wall Street firm made the decision to implement the ProStor InfiniVault not only for its ability to keep their data compliant but also because it was low cost and easy to manage. Management is done remotely 1,000 miles away from the data center where the system is stored. New York City like San Francisco requires a premium for real estate as well as power usage. Harbist adds that the firm chose the system because it draws very little power, takes up very little floor space, and was significantly lower in cost than any other competitive offering coming in at 1/8 the cost of other systems in environmentals.

About ProStor’s new product suite:
In a nutshell, ProStor’s storage systems can support business and organizations that are considered small to medium and even departments of the largest corporations. Their product line includes four different models ranging from 3 RDX slots up to 100 and they connect to a standard office network. The newest Model, the ProStor InfiniVault Model 5 is the most cost-effective solution for long-term retention of data (5 years or more) for a small-to-medium business or organization. All the ProStor models include software at no additional charge that provide a rich feature set critical to industry-specific data retention requirements, including HIPAA (for healthcare), SEC Rule 17a-4 (stockbrokers and dealers), Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Federal Rules for Civil Procedure and more. To date, ProStor InfiniVault is being used in a variety of markets including finance, government, healthcare, enterprise content management, broadcast and gaming.

About ProStor Systems
ProStor Systems provides industry-leading solutions for the cost-effective, long-term storage of digital information. ProStor’s RDX® removable disk technology is sold by leading server manufacturers Dell, HP, IBM, and others who combined have shipped over 125 petabytes to 250,000 customers worldwide. ProStor InfiniVault® is the most cost-effective storage system for the long-term retention of data and images. ProStor InfiniVault integrates information management software, online disk, and RDX removable disk to simplify retention management while automating disaster protection and regulatory compliance. This intelligent storage system is replacing optical, tape, and disk in healthcare, document imaging, financial services, digital video archive, service provider, and government markets.

For more information about ProStor Systems, visit www.prostorsystems.com or contact the company at info@prostorsystems.com or 303-565-3100. Visit www.rdxstorage.com to learn more about RDX removable disk technology.