Content Addressed Storage

Content Addressed Storage (CAS) is an object-oriented system for storing data that is not intended to be changed once it is stored (e.g., medical images, sales invoices, archived email). CAS provides a digital fingerprint (also known as an ID or logical address) ensuring it is the same exact piece of data that was saved; no duplicates are ever stored. The unique identifier also ensures that the record can be accessed no matter where it is located. CAS relies on disk storage instead of removable media, such as tape.

Federal Mandates Drive New IT Storage Solutions: Healthcare Regulations and Technologies Lead the Way by John Persinos, Larstan Business Reports, August 2005

Whether it's HIPAA and its strict requirements for medical data management, or Sarbanes-Oxley and its imposition of tighter financial reporting, new federal mandates are compelling IT managers to find innovative storage solutions to handle large and growing amounts of data. HIPAA regulations, in particular, are driving the emergence of new storage solutions. HIPAA establishes disaster recovery planning and requires that multiple copies of data be maintained for a minimum time period. These demands have given birth to a new category of storage - called CAS - that provides massive scalability, application awareness, simplified management, and instant access to data for online archiving.

Dramatic changes in healthcare are a major impetus behind the demand for CAS, as new methods of electronic prescribing and patient administration result in the digital hospital. A recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that digital hospitals rack up shorter average stays and reap improved operational revenues, compared to the national average. These technologies - combined with the pressures of HIPAA compliance - are paving the way for CAS.

Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), analysts in Milford, Mass., says that according to ESG research, digital reference files are growing in volume at an annual rate of 92 percent and now comprise 51 percent of stored data. “These files include documents, videos, scanned images, and other unstructured data,” he says.

CAS is an emerging category of storage that is extremely scalable, self-managing and cost effective. Notably, healthcare users seek storage systems that provide retention capabilities and “write once, read many” (WORM) functionality - features inherent to CAS storage. "Since the growth of digital reference data is growing so rapidly these characteristics are essential,” Asaro says.

Find out more at http://cascommunity.org/portal/index.php.

Articles

Content Addressed Storage Systems May Be at Risk by Lucas Mearian, Computerworld, January 28, 2005
Security experts are warning about a flawed hashing algorithm, MD5, used by some vendors for digital signatures to store data securely on increasingly popular content addressed storage systems. The warnings come as more companies unveil CAS systems to meet the need for disk-based backup of fixed data such as emails and medical images.

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