Business Issues
The Department of Optometry and Radiography (hereafter called "the department") of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University operates a radiography clinic that provides medical imaging services for over 2,700 university staff, their relatives and 22,000 students. The department used to store X-ray and medical images on film and had encountered problems with image storage and retrieval. Two years ago, it became the first campus in Asia Pacific to establish a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), a complete image-management system for taking medical images, making diagnoses, and distributing and storing digital images.

As the department continues to expand its curriculum, cross-universities research and clinical service, its disk RAID storage, which supported only up to 100 gigabytes (GB) of data, could no longer accommodate the enormous amounts of data generated from imaging modalities such as computed radiography (16MB per examination), computed tomography (20MB) and mammography (160MB). It required a scalable, reliable and affordable archiving storage solution to go with its PACS.

Solutions
The solution, which is comprised of the StorageTek L80 automated tape library, StorageTek Application Storage ManagerR (ASM) software and SDLT tape drives, provides a 4.4-terabyte (TB) archiving storage which enables the PACS to operate in full force.

Business Benefits
By implementing StorageTek's solution, the department was able to achieve three primary business benefits:

- High data availability to enhance academic and research development
- Facilitate better consultation and clinical service
- Improve overall productivity at high price/performance

Plans for the future
Moving ahead, the department plans to expand the PACS capacity by adding additional cartridge slots into the tape library.

Dr. Tang Fuk Hay, associate professor, Radiography, Department of Optometry and Radiography commented, "We intend to expand the tape library and assign specific slots for three streams of data storage including teaching, research and clinical applications. Separating such data under different storage will give us more flexibility and higher efficiency in managing our data and work process, enabling us to maximize performance and capacity in the respective areas, while concurrently managing the growth of our overall system."