Microsoft Azure Blob Storage provides flexible, economical storage for GE Healthcare’s medical imaging team

Customers rely on GE Healthcare to securely store images created with devices made by GE or other manufacturers so that the images can be referenced by radiologists and other healthcare providers. Moreover, they need images held for long periods of time to meet statutory obligations. 

To gain the scalability and flexibility required to manage its growing volumes of digital imagery, GE Healthcare recently migrated its stored images to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, a massively scalable and highly secure storage platform for cloud-native workloads, backup and archive, high-performance computing, AI/machine learning, and more. Blob Storage offers cost-effective storage of archived data while also meeting the needs of high-performance systems—all at cloud scale.

Medical imaging is evolving rapidly

For GE Healthcare, the motivation for migrating to Blob Storage was two-fold, says Tai Kim, Staff Product Manager at GE Healthcare. “One was cost,” he says. “We wanted to reduce our infrastructure builds, support expenses, and maintenance spending.” 

Continues Kim, “We also wanted a way to easily add additional features. We have a product called Edison Datalogue, which we use to access and share images. With Azure Blob Storage, we could run that as an add-in service.” 

GE Healthcare needed a system that would adapt to the future. Medical imaging is evolving, with more sophisticated equipment producing ever more detailed images. That additional detail increases the storage requirements of any one image. Sometimes medical centers even delay adding powerful new equipment for fear it will overwhelm their storage capacity.

Stringent storage requirements pose a second challenge. In the United States, for instance, images of adults must by law be retained for 7 years. If taken when the person is an infant, that becomes 21 years. But as time goes along, images are accessed less and less frequently for any one person, posing potentially high storage costs for little practical benefit. The key is to develop storage that is durable and affordable, but offers access as needed.

Making the move 

Microsoft developed a migration strategy that would allow GE Healthcare to move its huge image store to Blob Storage without having any impact on customers who may have urgent access needs. 

To achieve that goal required nearly a year of substantial engineering work, says Kristof Rennen, Senior Program Manager, Azure Storage at Microsoft. That time was spent drawing up step-by-step processes for the transfer and carefully defining all the data that needed to be moved.

GE Healthcare used Azure Data Box, a physical storage device that Microsoft offers for moving large sets of data to Blob Storage, to accelerate its migration to Azure. Each ruggedized Data Box can hold 80 terabytes of data and can transfer that data at speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. The data is encrypted, and the physical device weighs less than 50 pounds for easy transportation. Data Box devices are also available for fast delivery, easy to use, and highly secure.

To maximize transfer rates, GE Healthcare moved the data being migrated to a read-only state, where it could be copied to Data Box and then delivered to Blob Storage in the destination region. Live data and traffic to the destination storage accounts were minimized so that they could be transferred quickly and with reduced downtime.

Planning pays off

GE Healthcare began planning the data move well before actual work on it began. The company’s planning included engaging Microsoft to ensure that GE Healthcare was designing a solution that would work today and in the future, based on the Microsoft roadmap. Microsoft and GE imaging experts, data engineers, product teams, and others then convened for two days in Chicago. There they discussed the future of medical imaging and the potential customer scenarios that might appear. This helped future-proof the design of the Blob Storage solution. Following that session, engineering teams from GE and Microsoft continued to meet regularly. “That was a very detailed meeting,” says Kim. “We looked at what we would be able to accomplish together, what we needed from people and processes, what our strategy would be, and what kind of documentation we would need. We really had fun together every step of the way.”

That careful planning resulted in a process that went smoothly and stayed on time and on budget, all while giving GE Healthcare the flexibility and storage capabilities it needs. GE has seen a significant reduction in storage costs versus those for its previous on-premises storage.

Moving to Azure has also reduced the mean time to repair—an important metric for GE—by as much as 30 to 60 percent. Customer onboarding has also accelerated. It was a process that measured in weeks but has been reduced to days.

“We’re also seeing how easily we can scale,” says Kim. “As we added customers, we were able to see where we had undersized workloads. We then could scale those workloads to meet the needs of customers. And if anything breaks, we’re able to restore it quickly. Those and the monitoring pieces in our storage environment have been very beneficial for us, given the fact we have a small team and limited resources.”

A strong partnership

Moreover, Microsoft proved itself to be a reliable and responsive partner. “They just seemed like part of our team,” says Kim. “I was able to reach out to anybody who was involved almost instantaneously. They were part of us during this period of migration and they cared about the project as their own.”

Moving forward, GE Healthcare will build on its success with Blob Storage by connecting it more broadly across the organization and by adding capacity as new customers come online or existing ones add to their image libraries. With Blob Storage, GE Healthcare has a tool to give its healthcare customers best-in-class access to images that help save lives.