The Singing River Health System consists of two hospitals along Mississippi’s Gulf coast: Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula and Ocean Springs Hospital in Ocean Springs.
The system also maintains multiple medical parks along the gulf coast supporting 2,600 employees and over 300 physicians.
In 2005, after the Mississippi coast sustained billions in damage from Hurricane Katrina, Singing River has partnered with Brocade Networking Solutions, a company that recently landed in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (Visionaries) for its work on fabric-based data center architecture.
Specifically, the Brocade VCS Fabric has given Singing River a failover time of just a few seconds, which is critical when you’re living in the most hurricane-ridden area of the U.S.
Justin Hadler, director of engineering at Minneapolis-based Hardware.com, told Medical Office Today in January, that healthcare providers must have 24/7 access to patient records at all times. “It becomes detrimental when network access fails or a large-scale disaster strikes and inhibits immediate access to information stored in the cloud.”
“If network access becomes unavailable during a disaster, such as a hurricane, patients’ lives can be put at risk if records are not readily accessible.”
Brocade FCX switches support the production side of Singing River’s two networks, which ensures fast application delivery to end users. VDX switches are used for the data center side in conjunction with Brocade VCS Fabric technology. All of the Singing River clients come in at 1GB and receive patient record data at over 10GB.
“We live in a hurricane-prone environment, so we've designed our network infrastructure to accommodate a natural disaster recovery scenario by utilizing two separate data centers and replicating our data where appropriate,” explained Aaron Marsden, Singing River’s network and database administrator.
“Once we installed Brocade into our core infrastructure, we saw a marked improvement in application response times. The ability to move data in a non-blocking, fast way to the desktop was key to our success.”
During Hurricane Katrina, the Singing River network had limited connectivity for four hours. Since then, the system has built redundancy into its data center from the networking, storage and server infrastructures all the way to the desktop.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
