Information sharing among healthcare professionals, labs and other partners is expected to continue growing as pressure mounts from government regulators, insurance carriers and patients to improve efficiency, keep costs in line, and improve patient safety and reduce medical errors. The resulting exponential growth in traffic beyond the Local Area Network (LAN) places new strategic importance on the quality and cost of extending the LAN. Healthcare organizations increasingly are searching for cost-effective LAN extension techniques to leverage the many IT applications that require LAN performance over the Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting their remote locations.

Challenges

Most healthcare providers are deploying a significant number of critical Healthcare IT (HIT) applications to increase patient safety, reduce medical errors, and increase competitiveness. These applications include PACS, EHR, CPOE, bar coding, speech recognition technologies, automated clinician alerts and online scheduling. Many of these are image-heavy, bandwidth-intensive and highly time-sensitive, therefore low latency WAN performance and reliability are crucial. Additionally, with so many applications to support, flexibility is essential so that a WAN can support all IT initiatives cost-effectively.

Solution

Today’s optical Ethernet transport meets all of these performance and cost requirements for effective LAN extension across any distance. And with the right implementation, optical Ethernet hardware offers easy software-configurability so you can use the same network equipment to support all of your applications today, and reconfigure ports with simple software downloads as requirements evolve.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena extends LANs using optical Ethernet transport as part of its adaptive network architecture. These WANs are a practical approach to extending your critical applications across multiple locations, no matter how far, with reliability and ultimate flexibility. The adaptive networks use lower layer techniques such as Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) and SONET/SDH to minimize latency, maximize bandwidth efficiency and maintain applications transparency. Only Ciena uses flexible, software-programmable hardware to support any protocol on any port at any time. Ciena’s flexible network architecture is ideal for LAN extension and includes solutions qualified by all major storage vendors, including EMC®, IBM®, Hitachi Data Systems®, McData® and Qlogic®.

Benefits

• Enhance operational efficiency and improve clinical outcomes by interconnecting healthcare professionals across the entire organization
• Increase bandwidth efficiency and reduce leased line costs with data compression, protocol mapping, dynamic bandwidth assignment and the consolidation of multiple applications over a single WAN line
• Unmatched reliability: up to six-9s (99.9999%) availability (less than 31 seconds of unplanned downtime per year)
• Ultimate flexibility through software-programmable ports that minimize capital expense and adapt to future applications
• Applications transparency minimizes expensive and time-consuming applications tuning and debugging for application rollouts, software updates, bug fixes, etc.