One of the major ongoing projects for any healthcare organization is network modernization. While technology advances may occur rapidly, healthcare facilities must temper the speed of innovation with the impact on quality of care, patient safety and network and data security. As a result, legacy systems may linger for years as IT Staff work through the implications and timing of large scale infrastructure changes.
Colin Summers, Director of Network Services, OSF Healthcare talks about how industry consolidation efforts resulted in a motley of difficult-to-support systems and components in their infrastructure. They determined that OSF needed an entire network refresh to build a foundation for their explosive growth.
By incorporating the principles of resiliency, reliability and ease of support in their architecture review, OSF decided that fabric technology with Extreme Networks would ensure their future growth while maximizing failover options. Rather than supporting a myriad of inherited equipment from mergers and acquisitions, OSF simplified its network over fabric and a common Extreme network switch everywhere.
Now, new deployments are easy for staff and fabric allows OSF to automate provisioning, reducing hands-on efforts to a minimum. New acquisitions also take less time, because fabric nearly eliminates the need for manual integration of obtained servers in favor of a more controlled rollout of servers to maintain the security of OSF’s network backbone.
Learn more about how Colin Summers and OSF Healthcare achieved a simpler, more secure environment and less operating overhead with Extreme below:
