Archive for April, 2010
Back up your data
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Disaster Recovery vs. Live Archive
Data backup is must today. With the increased chance of computer viruses or corrupted data, we need to protect the computer data that’s so vital to our businesses. From accounting, to patient information, to digital x-rays, a data loss in any of these areas can lead to lost revenue, lost client trust, and may have legal ramifications.
To prevent such loss, digital imaging clients are using 2 types of data back up: Disaster Recovery and Live Archive.
Disaster recovery is an industry buzz word for an offsite data backup. Wikipedia defines it as:
Disaster recovery is the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_recovery)
While data backup protects information from viruses and corruption, disaster recovery also protects against the big three of: fire, theft, and flood. God forbid but if something catastrophic happened at the clinic you’d want the data far away in a protected environment. It would still be a pain to reload all the data back onto new hardware (which could take weeks) but, at least you haven’t lost any critical information. A Live Archive however addresses the former issue.
Recovering data after a disaster is time consuming, again sometimes taking weeks – a live archive fixes this. It is essentially a virtual “duplicate” of your digital image PACS server (not just the images) offsite. If a disaster should occur rendering the onsite server inoperable, the user would simply point the local workstation to the live archive and have access to historic data immediately! Rather than waiting weeks to access data, the downtime effect of a PACS server disaster would be negligible.
We’ve experienced that downtime is by far the most expensive dilemma for our customers. While disaster recovery can be as simple as backing up images to a CD and storing them at home or even contracting with local IT to backup images on their server – both fall short of the speed and integrity of a live archive. It’s imperative to at least have a disaster recovery backup but, if downtime is unacceptable, nothing matches the uptime of a live archive.
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