Healthcare Technology Featured Article

August 18, 2014

Brocade Deploys High-Performance Network


Healthcare facilities around the country are transitioning to Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to meet the new compliance regulations that have been put in place by the federal government. The goal is to introduce efficiency and productivity into the healthcare system and lower the skyrocketing prices, while at the same time delivering better services to patients.

Existing infrastructures that are in many hospitals still use legacy systems that will not be able to cope with the large amount of data created with EHR and other IT solutions, requiring upgrades. The Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Oklahoma's largest county hospital has chosen to upgrade its network by deploying Brocade's new high-performance end-to-end data center network.

The Brocade solution is going to allow the hospital to increase its network capacity by 10 fold and create a new fully redundant network architecture that is able to scale to meet the data and device demands it will be facing in the future.

Comanche County Memorial Hospital delivers major and minor healthcare services to 55,000 visitors annually. As the hospital continues to grow and residents of South Oklahoma integrate new technologies in their lives, they will be able to access remote healthcare services with confidence because of the new infrastructure that is in place.

The end-to-end networking environment was deployed by Brocade and its partner T2 Technology Group by installing the Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN switches, Brocade MLX routers, and Brocade FCX and Brocade ICX switches. This will deliver a 20 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network backbone, allowing the hospital to support the latest advances in telemedicine and radiology along with cost-saving business applications and communication solutions such as Voice over IP (VoIP).

The Brocade FCX Series of switches provide high levels of performance and scalability for delivering intelligence to the network edge with a flexible 1U form factor designed to reduce infrastructure and administrative costs. The wire-speed and non-blocking performance of this series of switches include 24- and 48-port models, in both Power over Ethernet (PoE) and non-PoE versions.

The flexibility of this platform makes it possible to use Brocade's stacking technology so organizations can stack up to eight switches into a single logical switch with up to 384 ports to simplify the management and the network access layer. Next generation enterprise applications can be enabled because the platform supports emerging Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE+) standard to deliver up to 30 watts of power to edge devices.

"As the hospital adds new systems, we can bring in more networking gear and drop more cabling easily to support our improvements," said Jeremy Wood, Network Administrator at Comanche Memorial Hospital. "We know Brocade won't limit our technology choices because the gear is based on industry standards rather than proprietary protocols. We can leverage that openness when we bring in other platforms and systems."




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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