January 05, 1998, Issue: 696 Section: Bandwidth
" ATM Cures Hospital's Network Ills "
Chuck Moozakis
When Christ Hospital was founded 125 years ago, the only packets hospital
administrators worried about were those containing medication.
Today the hospital is juggling packets of a different kind, but their importance
is no less critical, according to Rich Cronin, manager of technical sup-port.
Cronin, along with Ellen Robinson, Christ Hospital's director of information
services, just put the finishing touches on a four-month, $1.2 million upgrade
of the hospital's network, replacing a legacy mainframe system with an
ATM-based enterprise system supplied by 3Com.
"We studied where the hospital should be going technologically," Cronin said,
describing a five-year plan to improve patient care by migrating its legacy
AS/400 system to a client/server topology that could support medical imaging
and multimedia applications.
"It was clear that we needed a high-speed network capable of moving"
data-intensive images such as MRIs, EKGs and CAT scans, Cronin said.
"We also needed Internet and intranet capability and some means of
connecting the network to our other buildings."
Another motivating force leading the hospital to a switched topology was its
business software supplier, HBO & Co., said Robinson. HBO is the
health-care industry's leading software vendor, and its decision to migrate its
applications to an NT-based client/server environment propelled Christ
Hospital to follow the same course, she said.
"The AS/400 supported dumb terminals," she said. "We needed some-thing
far more intelligent."
Christ Hospital's network spans six buildings and 250 users, which will soon
double to 500, Cronin said. The hospital, which provides oncology,
cardiology, psychiatry, obstetrics, neurology and urology services to 15,000
inpatients and 300,000 outpatients annually, is ranked as one of the nation's
top hospitals, according to a survey compiled by U.S. News & World
Report.
Cronin said managers studied other topologies besides ATM before deciding
on the 155-Mbps ATM architecture. "We looked at Gigabit Ethernet, but it
is a contention-based protocol, and we couldn't guarantee reliability. As our
network grows, we have to be more conscious as information needs build.
ATM has bandwidth on demand, and we knew we wouldn't experience any
slow network times because of contention issues," Cronin said.
Christ Hospital's ATM network relies on seven 3Com CoreBuilder 7000
ATM switches and associated Ethernet workgroup devices. Dual ATM links
are used to connect each of the switches in order to ensure reliability and
scalability, Cronin said.
Fast Connections
Each of the switches also has redundant 100-megabit connections to five Dell
PowerEdge servers and 3Com SuperStack II Switch 1000 Ethernet devices.
The 1000 switches, in turn, have dual 10-Mbps connections to Dell PCs
prepackaged with 3Com EtherLink III and Fast EtherLink 10/100 network
interface cards.
The hospital is also using 3Com NetBuilder II routers to connect remote
users to its primary care center and home health facilities via its WAN.
Doctors dial in to a Citrix Systems Inc. WinFrame server to obtain patient
records; once the hospital adopts a thin-client deployment throughout the
institution, WinFrame will be a primary platform, Cronin said. "This will give
us the ability to change profiles on one server and effect changes in all the
desktops," he said.
Capitalizing On Speed
Christ Hospital's reliance on ATM throughout its network reflects its strategy
to capitalize on the technology's speed, Cronin said. "What we are trying to
do is what we believe is the true vision of ATM," Cronin said. "We have
developed an entire ATM strategy throughout the hospital. In this
environment, we have to have X-rays and other medical images down to the
desktop. Another environment may have to see if ATM is required. Here it is
the central strategy for us."
With the ATM network up and running, Cronin and Robinson will next turn
their attention to increasing the hospital's Internet and intranet capabilities. An
upgrade from NetWare 4.1 to Novell's IntranetWare 4.11 will permit the
hospital's departments to greatly increase their intranet usage, Cronin said.
On the Internet front, Christ Hospital wants to institute videoconferencing
within the next few months, using ATM's capabilities to transmit video training
to remote locations.
A Picture Archive and Communications System enabling users to access
historical X-rays, MRIs and other medical images via the network will also be
incorporated in 1998.
Finally, the hospital will begin rolling out NT servers as applications demand
it. "We are primarily a Novell shop, but we will use NT servers as needed. If
an application demands it we will switch to NT; and as HBO moves toward
NT we will move as well," Cronin said.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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