Oliver Seiler

Scalable fault tolerant image communication and storage grid

Increasing production and use of digital medical imagery are driving new approaches to information storage and management. Traditional, centralized approaches to image communication, storage and archiving are becoming increasingly expensive to scale and operate with high levels of reliability. Multi-site, geographically-distributed deployments connected by limited-bandwidth networks present further scalability, reliability, and availability challenges. A grid storage architecture built from a distributed network of low cost, off-the-shelf servers (nodes) provides scalable data and metadata storage, processing, and communication without single points of failure. Imaging studies are stored, replicated, cached, managed, and retrieved based on defined rules, and nodes within the grid can acquire studies and respond to queries. Grid nodes transparently load-balance queries, storage/retrieval requests, and replicate data for automated backup and disaster recovery. This approach reduces latency, increases availability, provides near-linear scalability and allows the creation of a geographically distributed medical imaging network infrastructure. This paper presents some key concepts in grid storage and discusses the results of a clinical deployment of a multi-site storage grid for cancer care in the province of British Columbia.