Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS)

Retrieve MRIs and CAT scans from your PACS systems faster and more efficiently over distance. Silver Peak eliminates more than 90 percent of the PACS data from the WAN, moving 7x more image slices per second. Radiologists can review medical images faster and off-site archival takes less time. With Silver Peak, PACS performs its best for every remote office. 

A Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) provides the storage, retrieval, distribution and presentation of medical images. Those images are divided into “slices” and delivered across the network where they are recombined and stored for retrieval by the medical professional.

While effective within a hospital or campus, PACS performance suffers across long distances. Medical images can exceed 50 megabytes and, as such, require substantial throughput to be moved quickly across a wide area network (WAN). The large file sizes also complicate replicating PACS data off-site. And as with all medical data, privacy is a major concern.  PACs traffic must be encrypted in-flight between locations with a virtual private network (VPN), which often further degrades network performance.

Adding more WAN bandwidth will not solve the problem. Delay, not bandwidth, is the biggest challenge for applications operating over distance. As delay increases, TCP throughput decreases regardless of bandwidth. Even where distance is limited, delay across WANs and particularly Internet virtual private networks (VPNs) may be longer than expected due to network congestion, and the service provider's  routing policies and peering practices. . And since provider networks are dynamic, delay on any route will fluctuate, complicating troubleshooting efforts and  frustrating users. 

Silver Peak addresses the network challenges undermining PACS, enabling medical professionals anywhere to share and retrieve images quickly, easily, and securely. More than 90 percent of PACS data can be deduplicated, allowing the organization to transfer more slices and reduce the amount of required bandwidth. Silver Peak also encrypts traffic in flight without impact on application performance or the scalability of the Silver Peak software. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following challenges:

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak  byte-level deduplication  removes redundant PACS data from the WAN. The first time PACS sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance.  
• Latency – Silver Peak  mitigates latency  enabling PACS to operate more efficiently over distance. CIFS Acceleration  includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations. TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and through Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.
• Congestion – Silver Peak makes PACS performance  more predictable across congested WANs. Lost packets are reconstituted in real-time at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple round-trip retransmissions. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order.

Silver Peak protects PACS data in-flight between locations with an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) running AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest in each Silver Peak instance is also encrypted with AES. End-to-end encryption is provided by SSL/TLS.

Numerous healthcare organizations  depend on Silver Peak every day including  Baptist Healthcare, Charleston Area Medical, Center, Mercy Health, Mayo Clinic, Nebraska Heart and more. When engaging with these customers, Silver Peak engineers typically find that PACS can move 7x more image slices across the Silver Peak-optimized WAN. 

Silver Peak offers the most scalable and cost-effective data acceleration software for connecting data centers, remote offices and the cloud. You can download and deploy it  as a free, self-service trial in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your organization.