How did Springhill Medical Center and Cumberland University scale network capacity?

BENGALURU, INDIA: Springhill Medical Center and Cumberland University are leveraging flow-based wired and wireless solutions to scale network capacity.

Both the organizations are seeing phenomenal growth in their Wi-Fi infrastructure needs, driven by the rapid adoption of smart phones, tablets, and wireless devices. At the same time, Wi-Fi technology advances, such as 802.11ac with Gigabit Wi-Fi speeds, put severe demand on wired networks.

The developments necessitated a shift to wired networks with the performance, flexibility, and scalability to grow with enterprises’ changing Wi-Fi needs.

Individually, Springhill Medical Center, a full-service hospital in Alabama, selected Aerohive and Brocade solutions to replace its outdated switch infrastructure, support its Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) and Allscripts Sunrise platform, and to anticipate the increasing demands of emerging healthcare technologies.

The new network delivers robust, high availability 10 to 40 GbE for critical healthcare applications while also providing 30 percent savings on equipment and significantly reduced maintenance costs.

The solutions together also provide visibility into network traffic and simplified network management.

On the other hand, Cumberland University, a private university in Tennessee, needed to replace its network core and edge to support an upgraded wireless network while also delivering high resiliency, performance, and flexibility for future needs.

Cumberland replaced its wireless network with Aerohive and Brocade solutions, which now provide a highly scalable network to four campus locations. As a result, Cumberland has been able to improve its students’ BYOD experience, which includes mobile courseware, collaboration tools, and learning resources.

“We were amazed at the configuration and management simplicity of the combined Brocade-Aerohive network solution compared to our old equipment,” said Troy Hopkins, Technical Services Manager, Springhill Medical Center. “Not only do we save time, but also we don’t need specialized experts just to manage the network.”

"The physical classroom that we all know is quickly extending to the cloud so naturally, our students expect convenient access to courseware and learning resources when and where they choose. The stack allows us to reliably deliver a virtual classroom to students in ways we could not with our legacy infrastructure. Additionally, the new infrastructure will allow us to keep pace with the growing array of connected devices, streaming video, and other applications that put increasing pressure on our bandwidth resources,” said William Lambert, Director, Information Technology, Cumberland University.