MAY 21, 2007 -- Children's Hospital Boston, one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, has deployed Ciena Corp.'s (search for Ciena) CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform to enable high-speed optical connections between multiple locations throughout its Boston campus and facilities in nearby Waltham and Needham, MA.
Children's Hospital Boston comprises several locations in downtown Boston primarily associated with pediatric healthcare and medical research. With an expansion to another facility located several miles away in Waltham and the moving of their primary data center to a state-of-the-art facility in another Boston suburb, Children's sought a high-performance, scalable DWDM platform that offered the performance and reliability of their Local Area Network (LAN) over a Wide Area Network (WAN) with the flexibility to accommodate future growth. Children's Hospital says it selected Ciena's CN 4200 for its multi-protocol capabilities, enabling the delivery of multiple services on-demand, including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), Fibre Channel, and video across multiple locations.
Children's also cited the platform's low latency to enable fast response times and its ability to scale to meet the needs of new services at higher speeds as demand evolves.
"With our increasing dependency on clinical information systems and the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), we need to provide a 100% available network backbone with capacity and performance that supports the application response times our clinicians require," explains Paul Scheib, director of IS Operations at Children's Hospital Boston. "With such critical information stored and sent across our network for hospital operations and data backup, we needed a versatile connectivity solution that would grow with our network and evolving clinical data requirements," he says.
"The CN 4200 stood out among competing platforms for its carrier-grade reliability and flexible design, particularly its software programmable hardware, allowing us to deliver any type of information on-demand to any point on our network," adds Scheib. "Our caregivers, no matter their location, have instant access to vital patient information that improves their diagnoses and treatments, thus enhancing the patient care."
Ciena says itd CN 4200 is a next-generation WDM transport and aggregation platform that can be configured on-demand to support any transport protocol--including SONET/SDH, Ethernet/GbE/10GbE, storage (Fibre Channel, FICON, ESCON) or video--at any speed, on any available port using what the company claims is the industry's first universal line card with individual user-programmable ports. Powered by FlexSelect OS, Ciena's intelligent control plane technology, and managed through ON-Center Network and Service ManagementISuite, the CN 4200 provides granular service level management and remote, point-and-click provisioning for adding or dropping services on the network, say company representatives.
"Traditional networking technologies are not equipped to meet the critical performance and flexibility requirements for the delivery of demanding healthcare applications," notes RayIPatalano, enterprise marketing manager at Ciena. "Recognizing the mission-critical nature of healthcare information as well as the need to meet HIPAA requirements, the CN 4200Iprovides Children's Hospital Boston with a proven, carrier-class solution that efficiently and flexibly delivers a full mix of applications across the entire organization-- over any distance--with low latency and high availability," he says.
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