New PowerCache and Replication Technology

Have you ever found yourself sitting at your workstation frustrated while watching the hour glass or staring at a blank screen while transferring images over a slow internet connection? What do you do? While adding network bandwidth may be an option, it's a costly solution. The simple and affordable answer is to use the PowerServer™ PowerCache.

Traditional PACS systems are designed to constantly send data back and forth between clients and servers to keep their information synchronized, and up-to-date. This approach may be feasible when both the server and client reside on a fast local network, but it quickly falls apart when transfers occur over the oftentimes unpredictable internet cloud. These latencies can dramatically slowdown your time-critical operations.

With PowerCache, image data is cached on the local network and close to the client workstation. When data is requested, cached images are retrieved immediately, without having to wait to be pulled from the remote PACS servers. This significantly reduces study load times, saving the bandwidth to propagate only the information from the PACS server that is new, changed, or not available locally. PowerCache is a perfect solution for facilities which maintain their servers in remote data centers yet demand robust, LAN-quality performance.

Benefits and Advantages

Putting a PACS server in a secure data center obviously has many benefits, however the downside is that access to patient images would be at the mercy of the shared internet. When images are repeatedly stored and fetched on demand from the server, your information is constantly threatened by transmission latency and data corruption. PowerCache eliminates this risk by storing the images locally, and fetches updated data from the server only when it’s needed. This means that study images acquired from your modalities do not have to wait for any round-trip image transmissions in order for it to be read by your staff. PowerCache gives you the double-comfort of knowing that your server is safe in a data center, while your technologists and radiologists enjoy and experience speedy performance.

Reduce your bandwidth footprint

Image quality has reached hi-fidelity while the number of slices produced by modalities have increased exponentially; the consequences are larger file sizes, more data series and increased bandwidth requirements. PowerCache helps alleviate this problem by greatly reducing the amount of data transmitted and received by the server over the internet. Data is still sent and maintained centrally, but the server will never resend data that are already available locally in PowerCache.

It’s all about speed

Caching is not a new concept, as it has been deployed in many other system applications where the original data is expensive to fetch, and fast but temporary local storage is required. The growing need for a reliable PACS system whose performance and speed is de-coupled from the dependence on its network architecture has arrived.

RamSoft’s PowerCache combined with its Smart Routing Technology will bring a whole new meaning to intelligent image data management.