Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

BRIGHAM & WOMEN'S HOSPITAL CHOOSE PROCOM'S NETFORCE STORAGE

Hospital patients' lives depend on the safety, clarity and purity of their medical records. The precise shape and size of a brain tumor is contained in a patient's computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, but could elude a surgeon who can only see the tumor as a series of sliced, one-dimensional images on film. The Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL) of Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, has chosen Procom Technology's NetFORCE 3100 as its network data storage solution.

The SPL develops advanced surgical techniques in neuroscience and tumor biology that demand the highest-quality 3D graphics and massive amounts of storage to accommodate the huge files. In order to store, access and process these files, SPL demanded the capacity and performance achieved with the NetFORCE 3100 storage solution, built from the ground up for safe data storage and speedy delivery.

"To ensure patient safety, medical data must be safe from any kind of corruption," said Dr. Ron Kikinis, director of the Surgical Planning Laboratory of the department of radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. "Procom's NetFORCE boosts our ability to organize and store essential, graphic-heavy 3D images, all while reducing IT maintenance efforts and allowing us to give our patients the best care."

The SPL is engaged in a variety of research and clinical activities that involve the processing and storage of large amounts of data. These include:

• Processing MRI scans from hundreds of patients imaged during several of hospital visits
• Building geometric models of a patient's anatomy based on scans from MRI, CT and other imaging modalities
• Editing and displaying anatomic models and tomographic slices for anatomy atlases
• Non-rigid matching of data from a collection of patients to each other or to that of a healthy person
• Assembling large databases of tumors and other characteristics of diseases for searching, comparison and analysis.

For all these applications, data can be accessed without delay to workstations and supercomputers, in the lab and in the operating rooms of BWH. In addition, the critical data is well organized and safe from disk failure or accidental modification.

"NetFORCE allows for convenient managing and tracking of disk usage, eliminating the need to think about individual disk drives, controllers and file servers," said Procom Technology director of marketing, Chris Martin. "Instead, our customers can focus on getting storage capacity quickly to the projects and groups that need it. As its storage needs grow, Brigham and Women's Hospital can add more disk arrays to the NetFORCE 3100 and allocate more storage space to users and groups transparently."

NetFORCE Series

The NetFORCE product family addresses the full spectrum of enterprise storage requirements with scalable solutions ranging from 103GB to 17TB, at as little as 1.3 cents per MB. Every NetFORCE product features a powerful combination of optimized software, open architecture and best-of- breed components, making them highly cost-effective and simple to install.

Procom's NetFORCE innovations include the recently introduced NetFORCE 800, which delivers enterprise-class features at an entry-level price point. The NetFORCE 1750 is a leader in storage density -- 1.8 TB in 5U of rack space -- at the lowest cost per megabyte in its class.

The NetFORCE 3500 and 3600 deliver high performance, feature-rich capabilities specifically designed for data intensive applications. NetFORCE with DUET enables both file level and block-level data access in the same storage solution. ProMirror's near real-time Safe Asynchronous Mirroring (SAM) architecture ensures data from the source filer is continuously reflected onto the target filer, eliminating any single point of failure.

About Brigham and Women's Hospital

BWH is a 716-bed nonprofit teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of Partners HealthCare System, an integrated health care delivery network. Internationally recognized as a leading academic health care institution, BWH is committed to excellence in patient care, medical research, and the training and education of health care professionals. The hospital's preeminence in all aspects of clinical care is coupled with its strength in medical research. A leading recipient of research grants from the National Institutes of Health, BWH conducts internationally acclaimed clinical, basic and epidemiological studies.

About Procom Technology

Procom Technology Inc, is a leading developer of storage software and worldwide provider of network attached storage (NAS) solutions. Since 1987, Procom has been the value leader in network attached storage solutions by providing enterprise-class features and functions at economical prices. Procom has installed more than 1,500 network attached storage solutions worldwide this year alone.

For more information about NetFORCE, please visit www.procom.com.