ADVA picked for NY-Presbyterian Hospital service expansion

April 18, 2005 Mahwah, NJ and Munich, Germany -- ADVA Optical Networking today announced that New York-Presbyterian Hospital has deployed the company's Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 3000 to support an array of high-bandwidth Ethernet and storage services.

According to a press release, the hospital has seen a 20% annual rise in bandwidth budget over the past five years; the platform's use of DWDM technology breaks that cycle, ensuring the hospital's network with capacity for future bandwidth demand, while also providing immediate, annual operational savings.

"Cost avoidance and the many new high-bandwidth applications currently under consideration by the hospital played a major factor in our decision," explains Aurelia Boyer, senior VP and chief information officer (CIO) of the hospital's information services. "By making the decision now to deploy DWDM, we have removed network bandwidth as a concern for such new applications; at the same time, we are effectively leveling future bandwidth costs at what they are today."

"The system is very user-friendly and provides a capital and operational cost advantage, while providing incredible scalability and reliability for our needs. This is important in a patient care environment," adds Valerie Punnett, VP of hospital information services.

The hospital has deployed FSP 3000 systems at its Manhattan campus locations, including data centers and patient care facilities. Multiple spur sites have been connected in a ring and logical mesh network measuring 50 km in circumference, and enhanced with Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) modules. According to the release, with DWDM technology, these sites are transporting up to 32 channels of native-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and Fibre Channel traffic without procuring additional strands of optical fiber along the network ring.

The hospital's applications include: a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), wherein radiology and cardiology images are digitally stored, manipulated, and shared across the sites; live telemetry data over network for physiological monitoring; system/application high-availability applications including Fiber Channel disc mirroring, wherein data is synchronously written to each of the hospital's data centers to ensure business continuity in the event of failure at one or the other of the sites; and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) connecting the enterprise to multiple carrier Points of Presence (PoPs) in New York City.

"One of the primary reasons that New York-Presbyterian is among the world's most respected hospitals is that they are always looking for ways to improve the care they provide," concludes Brian P. McCann, chief marketing and strategy officer at ADVA. "That the hospital has identified our FSP 3000 system as a tool in that effort is a tremendous validation of the product."

According to the company, its FSP 3000 platform employs parallel use of DWDM and TDM technology to enable all protocols between 8 Mbit/sec and 10Gbit/sec, as well as up to 256 applications with a total capacity of 320 Gbit/sec, to be transported over a single fiber pair. The system's design supports point-to-point, linear add/drop, ring, and meshed network topologies of up to 10 nodes across distances up to 500 km without regeneration.