SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 1, 2005 – RAID storage expert Infortrend® today announced that Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE), a recognized leader in the field of digital medical records management, has selected Infortrend's EonStor® subsystems for their private communications network that allows physicians, medical groups, hospitals, and insurance companies to securely transmit electronic medical information.
With over 85 percent of physicians in northeastern Indiana subscribing to MIE's MedWeb to securely transmit clinical billing and patient-health information, MIE management and system administrators compiled an extensive list of requirements to make sure their storage platform could reliably handle the high traffic, highly sensitive information. Chief among these were standalone operation, simple and low cost maintenance, and no requirement for a RAID card in the server.
"Other systems we tested had very poor uptime reliability and performance, especially when compared with Infortrend," commented Jason Eicholtz, systems administrator for MIE. "We were looking for a combination of cost, performance, reliability, and build quality. Infortrend offered us lower investment and a simple storage solution. When the host computer needs nothing special to use or see the storage array, that's a huge plus."
"MIE's focus on the healthcare industry, with an emphasis on providing digital medical record applications, made the need for reliable storage our paramount concern," said Peter Norder, vice president of business development at MIE. Added Jason Eicholtz, "While reliability and performance are more important than cost, thankfully the Infortrend devices delivered on all fronts. Since our deployment is with ATA drives, our rack space, power usage, and cooling needs are far lower than a similar sized solution using SCSI drives."
MIE has incorporated several Infortrend products into its system, starting with the 12-drive bay SCSI-to-ATA subsystems, and has now standardized on the Fibre-to-SATA models. Infortrend's RAID products are part of MIE's secure data center, as key components of its application services provider (ASP) digital medical records (DMR) applications. EonStor subsystems are also part of MIE's Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) solutions used in hospitals, imaging centers, and specialty medical practices.
"Infortrend's RAID subsystems are designed for secure, high performance, high availability environments, such as healthcare," stated Alan Johnson, director of product application engineering at Infortrend Corporation. "As a key element of MIE's internal storage and PACS solutions, we are proud to have our EonStor subsystems be part of MIE's product offering as they expand the implementation of their DMR solutions to serve doctors and patients on a national level."
Safety features contained in the firmware include: Intelligent Drive Handling, auto shutdown, auto cache flush, auto switch caching mode and auto shutdown (of the controller). These features are critical to the use of SATA drives in high-capacity enclosures and help to ensure the integrity of subsystem data. Media Scan examines drives to detect the presence of damaged sectors or bad blocks. Its ability to work in both degraded mode and during rebuild operations to reconstruct the array demonstrates the versatility of bad-block management in minimizing potential data loss.
Infortrend controllers and subsystems support up to 64TB per array and can deliver a broad range of RAID levels that include 0, 1(0+1), 3, 5, 10, 30, 50, JBOD, and NRAID. Each controller supports up to 1GB cache, has an IBM PowerPC processor, an Ethernet LAN port, and an RS-232C (audio jack) serial port for RAID array management.
RAIDWatch(R), a Java-based GUI RAID management tool, offers centralized issue notification and administration of all RAID arrays from a single screen. In-band support includes Windows 2000/XP, Sun Solaris, and Linux. Out-of-band support for Mac OS X and the above operating systems is available via web browser using the onboard Ethernet port.
MIE is a recognized leader in the field of digital medical records management. In 2004 and 2005, officers of MIE were asked to join the faculty of the Medical Records Institute, and to speak at its national conference on various clinical informatics topics. Mr. Norder has been invited to join the Indiana University School of Informatics Program Advisory Board, and regularly speaks on a regional and national level on the topics of clinical workflow enhancement and digital medical records. For the third consecutive year, MIE has garnered the Growth 100 Award given by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business to recognize the fastest growing, privately held companies in the state of Indiana. MIE was named a finalist for the 2005 MIRA Award in the Health and Life Sciences category.
Medical Informatics Engineering is located at
4101 W. Jefferson Blvd., Fort Wayne, IN 46804
Phone: 260-459-6270
Fax: 260-459-6271
www.mieweb.com
Focused on RAID storage technology since its founding in 1992, Infortrend designs, manufactures and markets cross-platform, high performance RAID storage solutions. The company specializes in firmware, driver, ASIC design and development of RAID controllers and subsystems that are storage area network (SAN) ready, and support iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SCSI and SATA interfaces. Designed to be flexible, cost-effective and feature-rich, Infortrend products are available through a worldwide network of OEMs, distributors, and storage integrators for high availability storage applications. Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495 and is on the web at www.infortrend.com.
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Infortrend, EonStor, and RAIDWatch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Infortrend Technology, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.