Understand different types of data storage
HIM Connection, May 31, 2005
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Data storage comprises a major part of electronic health record preparation. Understanding the pros and cons of storage types can help you put your resources to the best use. Longer-term storage can be configured as network attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), content addressable storage (CAS), or a combination of the three.
NAS is a networking architecture that attaches disk arrays to computers. NAS is economical because it relies on older, well-established technologies, such as the hard-drive standard advanced technology attachment and Internet protocol data networking. Implementing NAS creates significant savings because it requires minimal storage at the server level.
It also offers increased recovery-one of this strategy's most significant advantages. For example, in the event of a primary server failure, with NAS you have the ability to automatically remount a data set to a secondary server. Downtime in this scenario is minutes instead of hours. You can achieve this same result with replication and clustering, but the cost of supporting duplicate hardware and software is much higher and increases the load on your network.
SAN is similar to NAS but uses newer and faster communications technology-fiber channels-to create communication bandwidths of one or two gigabytes. With SAN, you can interconnect storage resources across wider physical distances into a shared pool and still maintain split-second response times for end users.
SAN works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all servers on a local area network or wide area network. Storage devices added to an SAN become accessible from any server in the larger network. The server acts as a pathway between the end user and the stored data.
CAS is an object-oriented system for storing data that users don't intend to change once stored. CAS assigns a unique identifying logical address to the data record when it's stored. The address is neither duplicated nor changed to ensure that the record always contains the same data it did as when it was originally stored.
This excerpt is adapted from the book Electronic Health Records: Strategies for Implementation.
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