Medical Provider Boosts Performance of Physician-Facing Applications

Critical Healthcare Is on the Edge

Like others in the industry, this healthcare provider is embracing edge computing to give physicians and technicians mobile access to powerful diagnostic and patient tracking systems. Because these applications are critical to patient outcomes, IT managers must carefully monitor performance on their network edge. They must be intentional about delivering the right data to their performance monitoring tools.

The Key Issue: Ensure Application Availability and Performance

In the healthcare sector, diagnostic applications and collaboration platforms have grown more common and critical in-patient care. The company wanted to ensure that physicians and other medical professionals have consistent and uninterrupted access to these systems from their wireless and mobile devices.

To reach this goal, the company kicked off a project to strengthen its overall network infrastructure and deliver high-quality edge performance. The project included an update to its network monitoring solutions, so operations engineers could track and manage application response time, server congestion, wireless dead zones, and failed transactions.

Keysight— a Keysight business — worked closely with the company’s external IT solution provider and its preferred monitoring tool vendors to build a new system. Now the company pulls all the relevant data from its network, removes uninteresting data at line-rate speed, and delivers the right data to every monitoring tool at top speed — even as traffic volume scales.

The Solution: Upgrade Network Infrastructure, Visibility, and Monitoring

The company wanted to improve application performance for medical personnel providing primary care to patients in 19 distributed health centers. The problem was multifaceted. The team needed to address the capacity of its network infrastructure and the systems that monitor the network. The project included the following:

• Upgraded network infrastructure: The company hired Presidio, a leading IT solutions provider, for help designing and implementing its network. The team wanted hardware and software components that would cost-effectively scale to support future growth. The design combined existing lower-speed 1G and 10G network segments with new, faster 40G fiber segments. A primary consideration in vendor selection was manageability. The company needed to keep ongoing operating costs low to meet its required return on investment. The evaluation committee decided to replace the existing gear with Cisco networking infrastructure. This decision led to a cascade of new requirements. The company needed to analyze NetFlow data and easily terminate encapsulated remote switched port analyzer (ERSPAN) traffic from remote health center locations. 

• Upgraded network visibility: To go along with its new network architecture, the company needed to upgrade its network visibility solutions as well. It needed access to traffic from 1G, 10G, and 40G network segments; aggregation of tap, SPAN, and ERSPAN packet traffic; and fast distribution of packet data to its security and performance monitoring tools. Presidio invited Keysight to present its portfolio of copper and fiber network taps and its Vision network packet brokers (NPBs), all managed using the single-pane Keysight Fabric Controller.