They’ve figured out how to share images anywhere, any time. But where do you keep all that data, especially when it requires miles and miles of storage?

Dell and Siemens (News - Alert) are coming to the rescue. This week at HIMSS they announced they will work together to provide “a massive amount of cloud storage space for medical images,” according to a story at cioinsight.com.

Called “the Siemens Image Sharing and Archiving (ISA) service,” the companies will offer a cloud platform for image archiving and sharing by any vendor, according to the story. ISA will use Dell's Unified Clinical Archive. The Dell archive will also provide redundant archiving support for the Siemens Healthcare Cloud Computing Center.

Dell (News - Alert) and Siemens formally announced the agreement at the HIMSS12 health care IT conference in Las Vegas.

"With Siemens, they'll have a first copy in their data center; the other copy will be in our Dell Unified Clinical Archive," Dr. Jamie Coffin, vice president and general manager for Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, told CIO Insight sister publication eWEEK, as reported in the cioinsight.com story.

The Unified Clinical Archive already stores images from computed axial tomography scans (CT), electrocardiograms and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests, according to the story. Siemens' ISA will now allow radiologists to store medical images as well as other types of medical data. ISA will allow radiologists and cardiologists to access and view medical data similar to how consumers log in to a portal like Google (News - Alert) for their personal information, Reiff told eWEEK.

A study released at HIMSS, sponsored by lifeIMAGE, a provider of solutions for universal e-sharing of medical images, has found that “advanced cloud-based technologies are a new imperative in today's fast-paced health environment,” and a way of providing open access to images.

Kurt Reiff, vice president of business management for SYNGO Americas at Siemens Healthcare, told cioinsight.com that the new system “could help imaging departments lower the cost of maintaining imaging archives.”  Siemens makes picture archiving and communication systems) as well as CT and MR scanners.

"One of the biggest challenges in health care right now is we have lots of customers that have petabyte image databases," added Coffin in the story. "Every time they change systems, they have to migrate this data and it's a hugely expensive proposition for them. We want to be able to get data on a system one time and never have to migrate the data no matter what the system is.”