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A Major US Hospital Utilizes NETSCOUT to Isolate Life-Critical DHCP Connectivity Issue in Minutes
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Personnel Tracking & Monitoring
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit health care operation, faced a significant challenge when the Vocera badges used for intra-caregiver communications were not being recognized in the hospital’s neonatal clinic. The badges, which provide instant communication between doctors, nurses, and other critical caregivers, were not getting on the network properly. This was a serious issue as the badges are mission critical to the neonatal clinic. The malfunction was potentially threatening lives. The Cleveland Clinic enterprise network is vast with over 48TB of wide area network (WAN) traffic per day and 18TB per day of Internet traffic. Its data center distribution through its NFS/ SMB Windows® and Linux® servers surpasses 200TB daily. With 165,000 active ports, the Cleveland Clinic enterprise network has as its cornerstone seven Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform, which combines multiple network elements including voice, video and data solutions, and an AT&T DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) optical technology overlaying its existing fiber optic backbone.
About The Customer
The Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit health care operation, offering a complete array of medical services from cardiology to urology and every specialty in between. In 2014 alone, the Cleveland Clinic had over 5.1 million patient visits with patients coming from all 50 states and over 100 countries. US News & World Report confirmed its status as a well-regarded, multi-specialty medical institution in America, ranking it fourth in the nation with nine of its medical specialties ranking in the top five and six placing in the top two. While its base of operations is in Cleveland, Ohio with many full-service family health centers scattered throughout the state of Ohio, it also has over 200 locations across the United States and Canada with hospitals in Toronto, West Palm Beach, Florida, Las Vegas – even as far away as Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Lastly, the Cleveland Clinic is not just a hospital system. Cleveland Clinic innovations have spun off over 60 companies, and have secured over 525 patents (it also has over 2,500 patent applications pending).
The Solution
After considering a number of options, Hines turned to an engineer that was working on the issue and commented, 'Let’s try the NETSCOUT tool.' Hines wasn’t as familiar with NETSCOUT’s nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform solution as it was a new addition to his arsenal of network and application performance management tools designed to help oversee a vast and increasingly complex enterprise network. In fact, it was only a week before that its implementation had been finalized. What was the result? The assistant fired it up and within five clicks of the mouse – without ever having used the tool before – found what turned out to be the smoking gun. The riddle of the Vocera badge nonconnectivity was resolved. The converging of both network and application performance management empowers network operations professionals to receive comprehensive service visibility across not only application tiers and end-to-end networks, but also diverse user devices where relevant as well. As the Cleveland Clinic found, nGeniusONE provides an integrated and consistent set of analytics and real-time views of specific network environment elements thus affording improved communication – and problem isolation – due to its Adaptive Session IntelligenceTM 2.0 (ASI) technology.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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