Candelis ImageGrid™ Expansion PAC Units are designed to enable smaller clinics and public health facilities to increase the archival storage capacity of their ImageGrid™ PACS database appliances in the most cost-effective and seamless manner possible. PACS Expansion Units provide RAID 5 archiving ranging from 3 TB to 11.25 TB in raw PACS database capacity; additions and upgrades can be installed in increments that match customers' PACS archive needs. ImageGrid's embedded pacs database have been integrated with the Expansion PAC Units in such a way that no changes or modifications are needed to routing protocols, IP addresses and AE titles – making pacs administration a simple matter for the clinic's IT manager.

Since the beginning of the PC era, image files – even family photos – have been very large, taking up a great deal of digital storage space. Scalable PACS allows a clinic to easily expand their PACS archive as required. The idea of the Expansion PAC is even more important today as medical imaging moves away from two-dimensional imaging into fully rotational, 3D imagery. Such three-dimensional modeling even in low resolution can take up gigabytes of storage space, and this is particularly true for detailed high-resolution medical images. Thanks to the dramatic fall in the price of computer technology, Candelis ImageGrid™ Expansion PAC Units make PACS expansion and upgrading very affordable. Since the scalable PACS are based on PC technology, it is very user-friendly and easily maintained.

Digital file size across the board are not getting any smaller, and the processing power and hard drive storage space required to handle such files increases every year. Candelis ImageGrid™ Expansion PAC Units mean that your clinic will be able to stay at the forefront of such technology and have the capacity for dealing with it as needed. Candelis ImageGrid™ Expansion PAC Units are priced affordably so that private practices, small and rural clinics and public health facilities will not experience undue financial hardship when IT system upgrades and expansion is required.

Candelis ImageGrid has been one of the leaders in making state-of-the-art medical imaging technology available to all professional health care facilities through hardware solutions that enable vast amounts of data storage, easily-build databases and custom archival systems, advanced communications capability over the World Wide Web as well as private Intranet systems and ease of use.

Sony's AIT3 and AIT5 tape libraries can be integrated into the Candelis ImageGrid™ PACS Appliance. The ImageGrid™ ILM Software allows any studies archived on an ImageGrid™ to be easily and seamlessly migrated to tape, while being actively managed in the ImageGrid's embedded database. This integration provides healthcare imaging centers with a comprehensive Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) system. Having a Sony Advance Intelligence Tape™ (AIT) library bundled with the ImageGrid provides imaging centers with full featured ILM solutions that are unavailable in other PACS systems. ILM software allows users to migrate dated images and data to a tape library for long-term archiving and recover disk storage capacity using the software's storage retention feature.

ILM storage with the ImageGrid™ provides an additional advantage to the cost effective, scalable and always-online access to studies that ImageGrid PACS appliances already provide customers with. The optional AIT tape library is designed to address the specific needs of medical imaging centers:

• Ability to back-up of patient studies as part of efforts for compliance with HIPAA
• Implementation of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy whereby older or "aged" studies are migrated to tape for long term archiving. In these cases, ImageGrid's Storage Retention feature can be used to delete permanently migrated studies from the RAID 5 archive to accommodate new studies.

In addition, ImageGrid™ ILM Software enables customers to take advantage of Sony AIT's unique features, such as Remote Memory-In-Cassette (R-MIC) and an embedded radio frequency transponder, to optimize tape access and data retrieval, provide a safeguard for data, and reduce administrative overhead related to tape handling.

The ImageGrid™ ILM Software is part of an effective ILM storage plan and provides for the efficient management of patient data throughout its entire lifespan.