UPMC prepares for onslaught of digital images and remote medical data

Imagine a stack of Bibles, more than 5 billion of them, reaching from the Earth to the moon: That's roughly the amount of patient medical data that will be stored by UPMC's health information systems come the end of 2016. To manage the coming flood, the Pittsburgh health system has partnered with IBM to improve its data storage system, building a private cloud to help it store, sort and—most importantly—compress and transmit the data.