Comcast Business (NASDAQ:CMCSA) is providing a 100 Gbps Ethernet connection between the recently opened University Technology Center on the campus of the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA, and the university's primary data center at University Park. It is the largest network operated by Comcast Business in the eastern United States and the third 100 Gbps Ethernet network the company has constructed across the country.
"The new data center will help make personalized medicine more of a reality for patients and their providers," said Jim Broach, director of the Penn State Institute for Personalized Medicine and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. "Data that used to take days, weeks or even months to analyze now may soon be processed in a matter of minutes or hours."
The dedicated Ethernet private line service is intended to enable patient, research and educational data to bypass the public Internet and be transmitted over a private connection. The 46,000-square-foot University Technology Center, dedicated in May, will utilize big data to enhance patient care through disease modeling and predictors for disease by more efficiently processing and analyzing clinical information.
As the backup location for Penn State's primary data center, the University Technology Center in Hershey will also be part of the university's disaster recovery plan. The 100 Gbps Ethernet private line is intended to help ensure access to critical data in the event of an outage.
In December, the K-20 Education Network in Washington State began using a 100 Gbps Ethernet Virtual Private Line from Comcast Business to support more than 100 higher education institutions, K-12 school districts and libraries across the region. In California, two 100 Gbps Ethernet Dedicated Internet lines from Comcast Business will help power the Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings.