Bronx hospital leaps to 10G

The good news was that the LAN at the North Bronx Healthcare Network was predictable; unfortunately that was the bad news, too.

With zero network downtime in five years, the Cisco-based LAN was "a phenomenally stable environment," says Dan Morreale, CIO at NBHN. But doctors and nurses using the system also could count on phenomenal delays when using applications over the healthcare provider's 10M bit/sec hubs and Fast Ethernet backbone. In fact, when running network applications, some NBHN staff members were known for giving computer screens that old familiar cheer for which this New York borough is famous.

"Clinicians were waiting 4 or 5 seconds or more for a response from the network" when using certain applications, Morreale says. "That wasn't going to go fly."

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The good news was that the LAN at the North Bronx Healthcare Network was predictable; unfortunately that was the bad news, too.

With zero network downtime in five years, the Cisco-based LAN was "a phenomenally stable environment," says Dan Morreale, CIO at NBHN. But doctors and nurses using the system also could count on phenomenal delays when using applications over the healthcare provider's 10M bit/sec hubs and Fast Ethernet backbone. In fact, when running network applications, some NBHN staff members were known for giving computer screens that old familiar cheer for which this New York borough is famous.

"Clinicians were waiting 4 or 5 seconds or more for a response from the network" when using certain applications, Morreale says. "That wasn't going to go fly."

A standard prescription for such a network problem might call for a Gigabit Ethernet upgrade. Instead, NBHN is skipping a step in the traditional migration path and by September will upgrade its network from LAN core to edge with 10G technology, which to date has been used mostly in the unusually high-powered networks of research facilities such as Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and San Diego Supercomputing Center.

Morreale says he feared that even 1G bit/sec might be outpaced by the hospital's ballooning LAN bandwidth needs - wiring closets and the backbone were running at 85% utilization. He decided 10G in the core would be the cure.

"We've had some high-bandwidth stuff in place for a while, but we knew some even heavier stuff was coming," Morreale says. "The flat network and low bandwidth wasn't going to cut it."

In recent years the hospital added digitized medical-imaging technology, which allows X-rays, MRIs and other images to be viewed and stored on computers instead of film and videotape. Also, doctors and clinicians commonly dictate notes into their desktop PCs instead of onto dictation minicassettes. That prompted the IT staff to set up servers and storage for the bulky voice note files. Videoconferencing among NBHN staff in separate buildings also was taking off.

For procuring the 10G gear, Cisco was first on the minds of Morreale and his staff.

"We had such a good track record with them, we thought it would be a straightforward upgrade," Morreale says. As a city-managed entity, NBHN must put out competitive bids for any major projects. This gave vendors such as Cisco, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks and Nortel a foot in the door.

The decision came down to Cisco and Extreme, Morreale says, and the hospital chose Extreme "based on price and functionality." The total network upgrade cost $3.5 million, plus installation from Extreme, he adds. He wouldn't say what the Cisco bid was, only that the Extreme price was "significantly lower."

In July, NBHN upgraded its core and distribution layers, which consist of two Extreme BlackDiamond switches in the core linked to BlackDiamonds in two adjacent buildings via 10G running over redundant fiber. BlackDiamonds soon will hook up the entire server farm - 100 nodes - with Gigabit connections, with 10G running back to the core.