Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Foundation Trust Selects Brocade Ethernet Fabric to Underpin Innovative Patient Records System - Seite 2

Hall added: "However, we knew it was vital that the right networking foundations were in place before we moved away from paper records. The PAS will be used to manage critical information across all of our facilities. Therefore any outage or infrastructure failure would have a major impact on patient care and our previous infrastructure simply could not have coped with the increase in traffic. We needed a network that was faster, more robust and more flexible. We quickly realised that Brocade's Ethernet fabric technology was the way to achieve that."

After a competitive tender process, Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust selected Brocade's VDX 6740 Ethernet fabric switches. The Ethernet fabric Top of Rack (ToR) switches feature 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports with 40 GbE uplinks. Together with Brocade VCS Fabric Technology, these switches are designed to deliver the high performance and low latency that the organisation needed to support its PAS.

12 VDX 6740 switches will be installed across two sites, greatly increasing the resilience of the network and boosting speed and reliability by enabling greater traffic across the network edge (known as 'East to West' traffic) without data needing to be directed back through the core network. With Gartner predicting that more than 80 percent of network traffic will be server-to-server in 2014², this capability is becoming increasingly critical for organisations across all sectors.

Deployment and testing of the Brocade solution has already begun and the Doncaster and Bassetlaw team is delighted with the results achieved to date.

"We wanted a best-of-breed solution that would be based on industry standards, rather than locking us into a single vendor," commented Hall. "We had a very specific set of criteria in mind during the tender process and it quickly became clear that Brocade was the only vendor that could match our requirements exactly."

Hall continued: "The improvement in performance has been fantastic, delivering the faster connectivity and increased resilience we needed. The fabric-based system is also much easier to configure and manage which helps us to be far more agile as an organisation. I'm now very confident that we have the platform we need to implement an electronic patient records system and we'll be moving ahead with that deployment in the coming months."