Singing River Health System Selects Brocade

Healthcare providers rely on efficient and
reliable networks for the secure transfer of patient data. With patient care
and privacy regulations top-of-mind for healthcare organizations, the
secure delivery of this information is of utmost concern, especially against
the backdrop of a DR situation.

After having weathered Hurricane Katrina in
2005, Singing River Health System has made
a concerted effort to strengthen its BC and DR systems with Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
networking solutions, implementing 1 and 10GbE performance using its VDX and
FCX switches in the data center and at the campus edge.

Singing River Health System maintains two hospitals, each with its own data
center, and multiple medical parks on the Mississippi gulf coast where it supports
2,600 employees and more than 300 physicians. Over the last several years, as
its operations have grown, so has its data center infrastructure. That
infrastructure supported just 25 servers several years ago but must support
more than 700 servers today. Singing River Health System has also implemented
new technologies, such as electronic switching, to
optimize the secure delivery of patient records.

The data network at Singing River Health
System is robust with two main networks to support essential applications.
The first network powers the organization’s storage operation where the
organization has implemented Brocade SAN solutions, while FCX switches
support the production side, delivering applications to end users. Through the
use of a high-performance network, the organization is able to
provide the necessary services and applications to end users who need the information
at their fingertips to provide healthcare and wellness services.

"The
objectives for our uptime are pretty stringent, so we need the reliable, fast
network we currently have. In addition, we were able to beat the industry
standard of 15 seconds for login time by more than 50%, by reaching seven
seconds after leveraging Brocade VCS Fabric technology. We can provide a BC and
DR setup that has a failover time in the range of seconds," said Aaron
Marsden, network and database administrator, Singing River Health System.
"It’s been fantastic working with
Brocade and we’re very pleased."

Singing River Health System’s many years of
success with Brocade SAN solutions is what led the organization to evaluate the
Brocade Ethernet fabric solutions based on VCS Fabric technology. Ultimately,
the healthcare organization chose VDX switches for the non-blocking
architecture that enables the organization to scale the fabric one switch at a
time. By using VDX switches on both sides of the network, the
organization is able to provide end users with low latency and maximum
availability. The result is faster application performance and a better end
user experience.

"Between
the redundancy that the switches provide at a physical level to the performance
levels that we see at the edge – on both the Ethernet and the SAN sides, we’re
more than happy with the performance of the Brocade solutions," said
Marsden. "We live in a
hurricane-prone environment, so we’ve designed our network infrastructure to
accommodate a natural DR scenario by utilizing two separate data centers and replicating
our data where appropriate. Brocade plays a significant part of that
infrastructure."

After Hurricane Katrina, when Singing River
Health System’s network had limited connectivity for four hours, the
organization began building in redundant capabilities at all levels of the data
center to include the networking, storage and server infrastructures all the
way to the desktop.

The organization’s network now provides a redundant, efficient, high-performance connectivity and
presentation engine for key medical applications, so that clinicians have fast
access to the information they need. The less time they spend at the computer,
the more time they can spend delivering care to their patients.

Singing River Health System has also implemented
Brocade Network Advisor to provide end-to-end visibility across its
network through an unified user experience. Brocade Network Advisor is an unified network management solution for data, storage,
application delivery, wireless and converged networks. It supports FC SANs,
FCoE, IP switching and routing (including Ethernet fabrics), and MPLS networks.

"Once
we installed Brocade into our core infrastructure, we saw a marked improvement
in application response times. The ability to move data in a non-blocking, fast
way to the desktop was key to our success," said Marsden.

Singing
River Health System is a governmental entity organized and existing pursuant to
the community hospital statutes of the State of Mississippi operating as a
not-for-profit organization.

In 2012, Singing River Health System
achieved the
following:

• 106,130 visits to the Emergency Rooms were recorded.
• 18,622 surgery cases were performed, including heart surgery and bariatric
  surgery.
• 81,000 visits to SRHS Clinics helped increase access to primary care.
• 1,611 people met charity care guidelines and received care at participating
  hospitals.
• 6,324 people in need of mental health assistance found help through outpatient
  programs.