Replication management service for fault-tolerant archiving: a globus toolkit web service for medical data grids

Data safety and recovery from disaster are critical to any IT operation Medical image PACS operations are especially vulnerable, because failure interrupts diagnostic evaluation and report generation. Subsequently patient care is adversely effected. Therefore data safety and continuous availability of medical images is critical for any hospital or medical care facility. Various PACS backup and fault-tolerant solutions have been introduced in recent years, but their implementation is either costly to implement or to maintain. Here we present a open-source solution using the concept of managed image replicas. The replicas reside in a OGSA data Grid, a novel computer science paradigm utilizing Globus Toolkit release 4, which is based on stateful services. Using the here described OGSA compliant Replication Management Service in conjunction with existing stateful GT4 services, one can establish a Grid PACS with continuous image availability. The new service is self-contained and self-healing. Therefore it requires little maintenance, can be redundantly deployed, and presents a cost-efficient alternative to existing solutions.