At the American Telemedicine Association show, IBM announced its new Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), a cross-IBM offering comprised of storage, software, servers and services.  The GMAS solution provides hospitals, clinics, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies with a multi-tier, multi-application and multi-site enterprise storage archive to deliver on-demand medical images, patient records and other critical healthcare reference information. 

Leveraging the newly announced IBM Grid Access Manager Software, IBM GMAS uses advanced virtualization, automation and grid technologies to provide healthcare and research organizations with fast and secure access to archived medical information as well as advanced data protection functions. This highly automated system allows IT administrators to focus on storage planning and infrastructure improvements and eliminates many non-value added manual administration tasks, thereby enabling higher IT service levels and levels improving clinical outcomes.  

Among the clinical and IT benefits offered by IBM GMAS are:

• Improved clinical application reliability and uptime with real time failover;
• Proactive data protection for life;
• Petabyte scalability and improved enterprise storage utilization;
• Multi-site, multi-application and multi-tier operation;
• Ability to leverage existing investments, including non-IBM hardware;
• Decreased total cost of ownership; and
• Elimination of hardware vendor lock-in.

IBM GMAS is a packaged solution based on IBM’s System Storage EXP3000, System Storage Grid Access Manager, System x 3650 servers and IBM Global Technology Storage Services.  GMAS is designed to provide flexible and scalable virtualized storage solutions for single site healthcare organizations, multi-site integrated delivery networks and regional healthcare organizations. GMAS will be delivered to market in packaged and pre-priced bundles, and generally available on June 1.