Lans & Routers Enterprise All Stars Don't Miss!Read the latest WhitePaper - Troubleshooting Remote Site Networks - Best Practices

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

BNSF Logistics

Building an open-source foundation.

An annual growth rate of 110% began to overwhelm the infrastructure of BNSF Logistics, a logistics and supply-chain solutions provider in Springdale, Ark., (and a sister company of BNSF Railway, another All-Star winner).

Following a series of acquisitions, the company had 14 operating locations, two hosting locations, two data centers and one business-continuity site. Led by Gregg Robbins, systems architect, the project team used off-the-shelf hardware to connect all the locations redundantly and kept each device's total deployment cost to less than $300.

The team designed and implemented a network foundation using an open source firewall, which includes an IPSec VPN, Open Shortest Path First routing, intrusion detection and content filtering. The deployment took fewer than 90 days and came in under the $20,000 budget, Robbins says.

"With our [open source] approach, we can deploy a remote office firewall/router/content filter to a location for under $60 if we reuse equipment or for about $300 with new appliance-like hardware."
- gregg robbins, systems architect, bnsf logistics

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

New data-center net for healthier recoveries.

A new optical and storage network let hospital personnel at 10 primary care and remote sites access a centralized Picture Archival Computer System and quickly download medical records and images, thus streamlining diagnosis. In some cases, diagnosis time has been cut in half, says Bob DelCampo, an IT manager at the hospital.

The additional bandwidth also is enabling new money-saving applications, such as videoconferencing and remote upgrade of desktops. Also, a new point-to-point data center network supports synchronous data replication, significantly improving recovery time. Tier 1 applications now can be recovered in two hours or less. The project is expected to save the hospital $8 million over four years.

Whitepapers

• Accelerating a Diverse Mix of Traffic Across the WAN
• Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-generation Collaboration
• Deploying Virtualized NetWare on Linux Whitepaper
• Driving Business Success Through Workgroup Choice and Flexibility
• Toward More Flexible, Next-Generation Collaboration Solutions
• Collaboration Tools and Organizational Success Whitepaper

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Webcasts

• Creating a high performance workplace with wireless networking
• Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance
• How to cut IT costs with wide-area data services (WDS)
• Making data centers the IT strategic focus
• Protecting assets and employees with IP Video Surveillance
• Stay out of the headlines: Detecting and preventing network intrusions

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Special Reports

• Ethernet Services: WAN options mature
• Keeping Spam at Bay
• Get More From Your WAN
• WAN Optimization: How to rev up sluggish applications
• IP address management in 2008 - six things to know
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more LANS & WANS special reports