The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom is undergoing a transformation to digitize the system. Just like the vast majority of the healthcare systems in the developed world, information and communications technology (ICT) is being adopted to introduce levels of efficiency designed to cut the ever-increasing cost of healthcare globally.
With a nationwide healthcare system comprised of hundreds of facilities around the country, the NHS is facing a considerable challenge to implement the right solution for its organization. One of the organizations, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which has three hospitals under its umbrella, has selected Brocade Ethernet Fabric to deliver the network infrastructure to support the patient administration system (PAS).
This new, innovative record patient system will migrate the facilities from traditional record-keeping to paperless records, providing better access to critical patient data and increased efficiency across the board.
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Brocade, provider of global networking solutions, is going to support the new infrastructure with its Ethernet fabrics and VCS Fabric Technology. These platforms have been proven with installations around the world to guarantee higher levels of automation, availability, efficiency, operational simplicity and performance.
As one of the largest NHS Trusts, Doncaster and Bassetlaw has more than 7,000 permanent employees and provide services to more than 420,000 people in South Yorkshire, North Nottinghamshire and the surrounding area.
The Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals chose 12 Brocade VDX 6740 Ethernet fabric switches, which will be installed across two sites.
The VDX 6740 Ethernet fabric Top of Rack (ToR) switches features10 GbE ports with 40 GbE uplinks and it can be deployed with1000BASET for existing 1 GbE server connectivity and upgraded via software to 10GBASE-T for future bandwidth growth.
Some of the other features include:
- Simplified architecture: Simplifies network architectures and enables cloud computing with Brocade VCS Fabric technology
- Easy configuration: Enables organizations to manage an entire VCS fabric as a single switch with Brocade VCS Logical Chassis
- Maximizes network utilization: Enables efficient, load-balanced multipathing at Layers 1, 2, and 3, including multiple Layer 3 gateways
- Advanced storage connectivity: Provides Ethernet storage connectivity for FCoE, iSCSI, and NAS
- Optimizes virtualization: Offers the automation needed to support highly virtualized server and storage environments while enabling the transition to cloud computing
"The PAS will be used to manage critical information across all of our facilities. Therefore any outage or infrastructure failure would have a major impact on patient care and our previous infrastructure simply could not have coped with the increase in traffic,” said Nigel Hall, ICT infrastructure manager, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “We needed a network that was faster, more robust and more flexible. We quickly realized that Brocade's Ethernet fabric technology was the way to achieve that."
Edited by
Alisen Downey
