How American Heart Association manages its Cisco network

The motto of the American Heart Association is simple: Learn and live. In other words, the more we know about heart disease, the more likely we can work to prevent the more than 1 million heart attacks in the country each year.

The same goes for the organization’s network group. The more information it can collect on not only the actual network, but the servers and Web applications supporting its critical research, the better the overall result.

“We know that every dollar of funding research saves a certain amount of lives,” says Josh Hinkle, manager of network management and security at the American Heart Association and a featured speaker at Network World’s recent IT Roadmap event in Dallas. “So we look at the bottom line for every technology spend and say, ‘How is this going to help us raise more money?’ From a network standpoint, if we can provide a higher uptime on Web applications and business applications, and the Web sites are more available, people are more apt to do business with us, creating more revenue. And save more lives.”

Providing better uptime for Web applications means extending focus beyond the network and homing in on the entire user experience, from browser to application to server to network and back. “The problem isn’t always the network,” Hinkle says. “And we needed a way to show that.”