Concord Hospital heals Web application latency

Consolidation projects are top-of-mind for many companies as they look to deliver improved IT services at lower costs. But consolidation projects aren't without their challenges. In the case of application consolidation, bringing everything under one roof can quickly raise performance problems - which won't go unnoticed by end users accustomed to accessing applications locally, rather than over the WAN.

Concord Hospital is no stranger to the issue. The regional medical center, which operates one of the busiest acute care hospitals in New Hampshire, launched a major IT initiative to consolidate a suite of clinical and administrative applications that were running in its many healthcare centers, clinics and physician offices. As part of the project, the hospital centralized its electronic medical records (EMR), billing, human resources, payroll and medical imaging applications at its data center on its main campus.

But after consolidating the applications, end users suffered significant delays trying to access the applications over the WAN. After looking into the problem, the IT team found it was due to latency, not oversubscription of WAN links, says Mark Starry, manager of IT infrastructure and security at Concord Hospital. (The hospital’s story appears in one of the feature articles I mentioned in the last newsletter, but there wasn’t room to tell the whole story. What follows are more details.)

The hospital’s core network is 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with fiber throughout the main campus and connecting some of its health centers. Either T-1 or T-3 WAN connections link the remaining clinics and physician practices.

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Consolidation projects are top-of-mind for many companies as they look to deliver improved IT services at lower costs. But consolidation projects aren't without their challenges. In the case of application consolidation, bringing everything under one roof can quickly raise performance problems - which won't go unnoticed by end users accustomed to accessing applications locally, rather than over the WAN.

Concord Hospital is no stranger to the issue. The regional medical center, which operates one of the busiest acute care hospitals in New Hampshire, launched a major IT initiative to consolidate a suite of clinical and administrative applications that were running in its many healthcare centers, clinics and physician offices. As part of the project, the hospital centralized its electronic medical records (EMR), billing, human resources, payroll and medical imaging applications at its data center on its main campus.

But after consolidating the applications, end users suffered significant delays trying to access the applications over the WAN. After looking into the problem, the IT team found it was due to latency, not oversubscription of WAN links, says Mark Starry, manager of IT infrastructure and security at Concord Hospital. (The hospital’s story appears in one of the feature articles I mentioned in the last newsletter, but there wasn’t room to tell the whole story. What follows are more details.)

The hospital’s core network is 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with fiber throughout the main campus and connecting some of its health centers. Either T-1 or T-3 WAN connections link the remaining clinics and physician practices.

“We have a 45 megabit Internet connection, but we might only have a 1.5 megabit connection to a physician practice. It was pretty easy to download a file and kill the whole link,” Starry says.

To help minimize the effect of latency on application response times, the hospital turned to Juniper’s WX application acceleration technology. It deployed Juniper’s WXC 590 appliance at the data center and installed WX 500s and WX 250s at 10 remote sites. (Compare application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products)

The WX platform can recognize and eliminate redundant transmissions using compression and caching techniques, which is key for Concord Hospital’s bandwidth-intensive applications, such as medical imaging. It also can speed application-specific protocols, such as TCP, UDP, HTTP/S, MAPI and CIFS, and accelerate SSL-encrypted applications.

“The difference was unbelievable,” Starry says. The IT department used to get 10 to 20 complaints about application performance per week - but those have essentially stopped, he says. “We’ve actually had instances where people have said that certain Web applications run faster over T-1s on a WAN accelerator than they do in our multi-gigabit core, because we've removed all of the latency that still exists in our core network.”

To prioritize and allocate bandwidth, Concord Hospital is using QoS and policy-based multipath features. IT classifies traffic as business critical, normal and standard. If performance is threatened, the WX gear can throttle down the speed of low priority file transfers and Internet downloads, for example, to protect business-critical applications like EMR.