WakeMed Health & Hospitals selects Ciena's packet networking solutions

Comtex News Network

Oct 29, 2012 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) --Ciena Corporation, a provider of communications networking equipment, software and services, has announced that WakeMed Health & Hospitals has upgraded its backbone network leveraging Ciena's packet networking solutions.

The enhanced network equips WakeMed's hospitals, clinics and data centers with greater capacity to support high-bandwidth clinical and business applications. Since deploying Ciena's solutions, WakeMed has reduced network real estate and power consumption expenses by roughly 70 percent, which has resulted in approximately 60 percent reduction of the total operating cost for its network, the company said.

To improve network availability and expand the total capacity of its aging backbone network, WakeMed deployed Ciena's 5150 Service Aggregation Switch. The upgraded network has quadrupled the health care system's bandwidth capacity, and provided carrier-grade resiliency and reliability to ensure delivery of critical health care applications and services, such as picture archiving and communications system (PACS), e-ICU, electronic health records (EHR) and administrative applications.

WakeMed leveraged Ciena's packet networking technology to segment its application traffic into three types of virtual local area networks (VLANs): a VOIP signaling network with high quality of service priority; router-to-router backbone connectivity using resilient G.8032 ethernet rings; and a data network for other business and healthcare applications.

Chad Whalen, vice president and general manager, North America Field Operations, Ciena, said: "For a regional health care provider like WakeMed that operates multiple facilities in disparate locations, it is essential to have a reliable network that can connect its facilities to each other, and to data centers, instantly. Using the 5150 to offer high-bandwidth broadband access along with Ronco's expertise for project management, WakeMed now boasts a reliable, flexible backbone network that can scale to meet a growing array of digital health care services."

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