By Healthcare Facilities Today

Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare maintains large and growing volumes of data. Intermountain estimates that the volume of data will grow at about 25 to 30 percent each year for the foreseeable future, and estimates that the health system will be responsible for 15 petabytes in another five years, in an article posited on the Healthcare Informatics website,.

Don Franklin, Intermountain’s assistant vice president of infrastructure and operations believes Intermountain will be able to meet those challenges, citing declining costs of some storage disks and technology innovations. But unlike many other entities, while Intermountain has explored the possibility of using the cloud, it has stayed earthbound in its storage strategies.

"Intermountain is pretty conservative," he says. "We are focused on the patients and on protecting their data, so we are very conservative about moving data to the cloud."

According to the article, the health system has embraced other technologies to help it manage its data storage effectively.

For instance, by using multiple tiers of storage, by making data available at the appropriate speeds. Tiering is currently done manually, in terms of looking at the characteristics of the data and storing it appropriately at the beginning. The health system is exploring the use of auto-tiering, which automatically stores data on the appropriate media according to its availability needs, which can save costs by storing data on lower cost media when appropriate. 

Read the article.