Case Study: The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University achieves fast, scalable, backup-free medical image cloud with Hitachi Vantara

The First Affiliated Hospital Builds Medical Image Cloud

The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University faced rapidly growing PACS image data (30–40% annual growth, from 260 TB in 2018 toward ~1,000 TB by 2023), slow image access during ward rounds, limited PACS online space, and fragile offline archiving methods. To address these challenges the hospital engaged Hitachi Vantara, deploying Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI) and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to modernize storage, accelerate access, and ensure long-term data retention.

Hitachi Vantara implemented HDI with ~70 TB of flash as a high‑performance front end and HCP object storage as the scalable archive, replicating recent data daily so 12 months remain online while older images are retained as pointers for fast recall. The change cut access times dramatically (e.g., 512 KB CT files from ~1 minute to seconds and 500 MB radiography files from ~30 minutes to seconds), improved daily reading speeds for clinicians, provided elastic expansion (HCP scales toward hundreds of petabytes), enabled 24x7 online archiving and historical access, and delivered backup‑free, WORM/erasure‑coded protection for long‑term image integrity.

The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University