How can virtualization help PACS/RIS?

(Interactive content up)

Benefits of virtualization to PACS/RIS.

1. Disaster Recovery .. Backup/Restore/live system in no-time. taking snap-shot of your virtual machine is piece of cake. and restoring to a particular snap-shot is another piece of mind.

Your hardware crashes, your PACS server room flooded with sewage (like what happened in Kuwait Cancer Control Center -Nuc.Med.)     You can easily revert to the last snap-shot of your virtual server. Paying attention that you have the right DB backup tool.

2. Hardware/OS independent Application/DB servers Your applications, Databases, interface, and more can be installed on any Hardware and Operating system platform. No worry if your application does not support latest OS or HW.

Is you old PACS running on outdated server hardware? Your PACS vendor suggesting Fork-left upgrade ? Your budget is very tight or your hospital has no budget for PACS ?   solution is to virtualize your PACS/RIS.

3. Virtual machines as test systems for updates, patches, upgrades, DB modification, etc.. Un-tested patches may cause more harm to your system, vendors approval for patches take for ever, and vendors latest upgrade can add as much bugs as it solves.

That can be on two levels. Desktop virtualization or Server virtualization.   Have you ever updated your windows on your RIS client? suddenly your client behaves weird !   your Webviewer stops viewing correctly !  Did your modality worklist stop working after new patch ?!   Testing on a virtual copy of your system is the solution.

4. Easy transition to cloud based operation. Do you want to share you images with other facilities/hospitals ? Do you want to give access to your physicians ?

If One day, hospital management decides to move your PACS server room to a new building. How long is the down time ?
With Virtual cloud solution like Vsphere from VMware you can do that with a click [not sure how long this will take effect :)   ]   Vsphere is marketed as the first cloud OS.

5. Easy business continuity and availability, and fail-over. PACS will never go down this way due to hardware or OS crash.

Imagine you ask Radiology in the ER for a couple of hours of downtime !!    Again Virtual cloud can play a big role in allowing high availability and business continuity .. because your applications/DB are some where on some HW and you can move it from one hardware to another.

6. Hardware utilization. Can use multiple applications on when hardware. For example, Speech server and fax server or for small facilities, PACS & RIS can diffidently share the same server (hardware)
Your radiology department get's a new PACS document scan software and you don't have a dedicated HW for that.. Easy ! You can fit multiple Virtual servers on one real hardware.. just calculate your resources and put what ever fits in one hardware.

7. Storage Virtualization. Virtual storage is a form of software based redundant storage. This can help saving cost, scaleable image archive, and backup of the entire short-term archive. A very good example of virtual storage is FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org)

Standard RAID systems(i.e. RAID 5) are expensive, they are still not reliable. If you loose your RAID configuration you will probably loose data !     Storage virtualization means means redundancy on software level .. cheaper solution with more flexibility with redundancy.   Disaster Recovery and "second-copy" is piece of cake and cost almost nothing to buying a new hardware if you store on a virtual software-based storage solution.