Audit-proof archiving with minimal effort

Hanau Hospital, a long-standing customer of iTernity, has modernized its archiving infrastructure. The new managed storage platform iCAS FS combines audit-security, high availability, and cost efficiency with minimal IT effort.

Hanau Hospital, an academic teaching hospital providing maximum care, relies on iTernity's managed storage platform iCAS FS. By transitioning from the previous archive middleware iCAS to the innovative iCAS FS platform, the hospital is addressing growing demands for scalability, compliance, and high availability.

In 2011, Hanau Hospital chose iCAS as its archiving solution due to its high flexibility, independence from underlying hardware, and advantageous cost-performance ratio. When the existing storage hardware could no longer meet the demands of ever-increasing data volumes, the archive infrastructure needed to be modernized. With iCAS FS, the hospital found a platform that builds on the proven strengths of iCAS while offering the benefits of a scalable and cost-efficient scale-out architecture. Thanks to iTernity's managed storage services, IT effort has been minimized, while data archiving remains secure and future-proof in the long term.

Challenges and requirements

As a central healthcare provider in the Main-Kinzig region, Hanau Hospital processes enormous volumes of patient data, including medical imaging, digital patient records, SAP data, and invoices. Alongside the increasing flood of data — rising from 550 GB per month in 2016 to approximately 4 TB per month in 2024 — the hospital must comply with regulations such as GDPR, the IT Security Act 2.0, and the German X-ray Ordinance.

The solution: iCAS FS by iTernity

The managed storage platform iCAS FS is based on a software-defined scale-out architecture. This solution provides key advantages:

• Ensuring audit security, data integrity and availability through WORM storage, retention management, asynchronous replication, and more.

• No IT effort, as administration, monitoring, troubleshooting, updates and maintenance are completely taken over by iTernity as part of the managed storage services.

• High availability ensured by active-active clusters and asynchronous replication.

• Manage data growth using scale-out architecture.

• A robust and failure-safe archiving system that stands for uninterrupted patient care.

„The biggest advantage of the iCAS FS storage platform is that – thanks to the managed storage services – we no longer have to worry about archiving since its implementation. Data is simply archived in an audit-proof manner. The iCAS FS system runs very stable.”, says Sören Peters, IT specialist for system integration at Hanau Hospital

The Hanau Hospital sees another significant advantage of iCAS FS in the asynchronous replication of the data. This capability is an important factor in ensuring data availability and protection against natural disasters and human and technical errors.

Sören Peters highlights the importance of this feature: „Since we use iCAS FS not only as a pure archive system, but in the case of PACS data also as an active storage medium and currently do not have any intermediate storage, we are dependent on being able to access the data at any time not just for reading, but also for writing. This works very well with iCAS FS.“

A look into the future

In the future, the Hanau Hospital plans to integrate additional data sources, such as emails, into its audit-proof archiving system and expand the platform as part of KHZG (German Hospital Future Act) projects.

Another major challenge remains safeguarding data against ransomware attacks. iCAS FS offers optimal protection with features like S3 Object Lock and WORM storage, preventing data encryption, manipulation, or deletion—whether caused by ransomware or malicious employees. Furthermore, iCAS FS is based on a closed architecture with a hardened Linux operating system. There is no administration access on the customer side, which minimizes the IT attack surface.