Texas Department of Health Success Story

Texas Department of Health
...relies on Pioneer and halFILE

Instant access was Eric Bindock’s primary concern when he began his search for a data storage solution. Bindock works for the Texas Department of Health, where the fiscal department processes greater than 600,000 vouchers per year. Legal requirements to keep those records for ten years made Bindock’s dilemna even more complicated. That’s why he turned to hal Systems Corporation for a turn-key solution to capture and store his critical data.

“After reviewing the Texas Department of Health’s requirements we knew they’d need a high capacity optical solution,” said Tom Hokanson, vice president, software development at hal Systems. “In addition to other equipment, we recommended an investment in two DRM-5004X CD-ROM jukeboxes from Pioneer.”

The DRM-5004X holds up to 500 CD-ROM discs. With each disc capable of holding the equivalent of ten to twenty thousand pages, the DRM-5004X stores a total of 5 to 10 million pages or 330 gigabytes of data at a cost of less than six cents per megabyte. The unit is equipped with two CD-ROM readers and can be expanded with optional drives to enable simultaneous access to as many as four CD-ROM or CD-R discs.

Each drive features a high sustained data transfer rate of 614 Kbytes per second (4X) and complies with the SCSI-2 ANSI standard. The DRM-5004X can also be equipped with one or more CD-R (CD-ROM Recorder) units that allow the user to write data onto CD-ROM discs.

Now at the Texas Department of Health every voucher that goes through the agency is scanned, indexed using bar code recognition and written to a CD stage area that, when full, gets mastered to CD-ROM and placed into one of two DRM-5004X jukeboxes. The Jukeboxes are shared across the WAN on two Novell 4.x file servers (software is CD-NOW from MicroTest) while the search database resides on a Microsoft SQL Server. Users can access the jukebox via Windows 3.x or Windows 95 clients. The software used to manage the system is hal Systems Document Storage and Retrieval Software called halFILE for Windows.

For each CD mastered two additional copies are made and stored off-site for extra security.

“Not only does this solution provide me with the instant access I needed, I’m confident that my data will be secure and available for the next ten years,” stated Bindock.

The Texas Department of Health was so pleased with the performance of the jukeboxes that they also purchased the DRM-1004X 100 disc CD-ROM jukebox for storing scanned personnel documents.

Reading at 4.4X and recording at 4X, the DRM-1004X jukebox accommodates up to 100 CD-ROM discs using two separate, removable 50-disc magazines. The jukebox is capable of loading discs in less than three seconds without the load process inhibiting read and write operations. Its user-friendly keypad display and convenient mailslot allow users to load and retrieve discs on command without having to open the changer door.

The DRM-1004X is SCSI-2 compatible and supports all major CD standards and formats including CD-ROM, CD-DA, XA Mode, Yellow Book and Orange Book. Using third party software solutions, the DRM-1004X can be easily integrated into all popular network environments.

Pioneer jukeboxes are ideal for frequently accessing data on networks, data archival, imaging management, multimedia and other applications in government, defense, corporate, medical, banking, insurance, legal and other personal computing environments. Featuring an extremely high reliability rate, these jukeboxes have a mean swap between failure (MSBF) rating of one million swaps.

“hal Systems’ turn-key solution turned out to be the best value for our dollar,” said Bindock. “The Pioneer jukeboxes give us the comfort of knowing our data is secure and immediately accessible.”

10830 North Central Expressway, Suite 460
Dallas, TX 75231
(800) 442-9273 or (214) 691-4700