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Healthcare Case Study
We installed a high level WAN and LAN infrastructure for a London blue chip hospital organisation linking 18 sites with ongoing support.
Case Study
Brief:
This US based international healthcare group comprising of a variety of private hospitals and consulting facilities across central London required its network infrastructure to be re-engineered to accommodate the creation of a new corporate data centre located in central London with full resiliency.
The legacy network infrastructure was in need of both a technology refresh, significant enhancement of bandwidth, performance and latency to allow deployment of new network based services.
Approach:
The initial technical concept (pre contract award) comprised of a low level design. On award of the contract high level design was created and staged prior to the supply and implementation of the complete network and migration of approximately 4,500 users spread across 18 primary sites (data centres, hospitals, laboratories, consulting facilities and administrative offices) together with a number of further secondary sites.
Solution:
The network implemented is based on Cisco hardware which is implemented as a high performance switched MAN across the primary sites, providing resiliency, high availability and low latency across the infrastructure. The LAN on each site uses a resilient gigabit core with all distribution switches dual homed to the core. A comprehensive network management platform has been implemented to monitor and maintain the infrastructure based at the data centre.
Implementation:
The Cisco hardware was rolled out using innovative automated scripting techniques to ensure that the Cisco routing switches (150) in the design could be configured to a defined precise model, with 100% accuracy and unparalleled production quality.
The MAN migration was thoroughly planned with full design documentation, appropriate risk mitigation, test points, decision points and pre-planned staged back-out procedures. The migration of all major sites and 4,500 users was successfully completed during a single 18 hour period. Thus proving design, pre-staging, risk assessment, documentation and project management are key disciplines to a project of this nature.
Development:
As with all networks they are not static for long, the network has been further enhanced to include deployment of VoIP (Voice over IP) production PBX traffic between the larger hospitals and the data centre -using both Avaya and Phillips technology and now includes IP Telephony delivered across the network to the smaller sites.
Support:
EnablesIT provides 24/7 with a 4 hour fix support all year round and continues to implement further enhancements to the network.
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