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Located in the Hexi district of Xiangtan City, a historical and cultural centre in China's Hunan Province, the Xiangtan Central Hospital (originally called the Huijing Hospital) was founded in 1900. Today, it provides a wide range of medical services, including teaching, scientific research and healthcare for people in Xiangtan as well as other provinces and cities such as Jiangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, serving a total of about 400,000 outpatients and 25,000 inpatients a year.
The hospital facilities occupy an area of over 70 acres, including floor space of over 80,000 square metres. It has 710 beds in 19 wards, plus 34 specialist clinics, 29 specialized medical faculties and six clinical labs. Xiangtan Central Hospital employs over 1,000 people, including 160 senior staff and about 400 professionals and specialists. |
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The development of high-performance information networks is just as important in the healthcare and medical sector as in any other industry, and China's Xiangtan Central Hospital is rising to the challenge to improve productivity and management standards by leveraging new, advanced network technologies.
To meet the needs of its ongoing business development, Xiangtan Central Hospital built a new in-patient building in 2005, and decided to upgrade its information network before the new facility opened. Its network infrastructure had been relatively simple in the past, built around a Layer-2 switch, but it was starting to struggle in terms of performance, manageability and security.
In In February 2006, ProCurve Networking by HP was selected to design and build a new network solution for Xiangtan Central Hospital, focusing on fast and secure network access for the users and easy network management for the hospital's administrators.
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Although it enjoys a good reputation for medical excellence and provision of healthcare, Xiangtan Central Hospital desired to achieve even higher standards in the areas of hospital administration and management of resources. The hospital administration recognized that an advanced information network is critical to its twin objectives of improving staff productivity and efficiency in resource allocation.
In its search for the most suitable network solution, Xiangtan Central Hospital focused on three benefits - it wanted an advanced information network that is efficient, easy-to-manage, and secure.
The aim was to install a high-speed network architecture with redundancy, establish an information superhighway for hospital staff, and provide an efficient information platform to support the delivery of more medical and healthcare services. The new network would be designed around a 10Gigabit
Layer-3 core switch, with network switches on each floor linked to the core switch via 1-Gigabit fiber optic connections.
The chosen network architecture was ProCurve Networking's Adaptive Edge Architecture™, a network design strategy based on two key principles: maintain complete command of the network at the centre, and bring control and intelligence to the network edge where users connect.
This approach distributes network intelligence to the network edge where users connect. With this approach, it is possible to shift the network infrastructure from being device-centric to user-centric and user access decisions can be made automatically. Known users trying to access the network, regardless of where they are connecting from, are identified and given access based on user, group, time and location.
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The key requirements of the new information network were use of advanced network technologies, reliability, security, scalability, openness and cost-effectiveness, as well as easy management and maintenance. Xiangtan Central Hospital also emphasized the following technical specifications:
- High-speed fiber optic links connecting different hospital buildings
- High-speed access to the Internet
- A high-performance 10-Gigabit switch to ensure high network performance
- A three-tier architecture consisting of the core, convergence and access tiers, to effectively isolate subnetworks of different functions and prevent the transmission of errors
- QoS support to provide flexibility for adjusting bandwidth, thus enabling rational allocation and use of resources
- Multicast should be effectively supported
- The network should have flexibility for VLAN partitioning, and dynamic VLAN or GUEST VLAN to be deployed locally.
- Network management software to monitor the entire network in real time, analyze network performance, recognize and resolve issues promptly. It is important that when an event occurs, the network administrator can be notified immediately via various communication channels.
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In February 2006, after careful appraisal of several network providers, a technical team from the hospital selected Hunan Fengde Trading Development Co. Ltd to design and implement an efficient and stable information platform for Xiangtan Central Hopsital. The network is built around high-performance ProCurve switches.
Having analyzed the hospital's requirements, ProCurve Networking by HP came up with a tailored solution, focusing on critical factors such as performance, reliability, security, scalability, openness, industry standards and manageability.
The core switch selected by Xiangtan Central Hospital is a ProCurve Switch 8108fl, the first fabric switch in the industry that focuses on high availability, high-bandwidth and cost-effectiveness, providing a high-speed interconnection for the ProCurve Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ network. The ProCurve 8100fl series is also streamlined to provide high availability and high-performance connectivity between intelligent edge devices, and delivers critical features geared towards enabling a dynamic, user-centric network.
A ProCurve Switch 3400cl-24G, which is a 10Gigabit Layer-3 switch, was deployed at the hospital outpatient building as a convergence switch. The ProCurve 3400cl Series switches are exceptionally affordable 24- and 48-port 10/100/1000 intelligent EDGE stackables with optional 10-Gigabit uplinks and stacking capability. This series was developed in response to the growing need for network capacity to meet the high demands of new mainstream applications. The 3400cl switch provides outstanding performance, traffic management and access control capabilities.
The ProCurve 2600 Series switches are deployed as access switches. The ProCurve Switch 2600 Series is a family of low-cost, stackable, multi-layer, managed 50- or 26-port switches with 48 or 24 auto-sensing 10/100 ports and two dual-personality ports for 10/100/1000 or mini-GBIC connectivity.
Since static IP addressing is deployed in the hospital, IP Lockdown is configured on the ProCurve 2600 access switches to prevent unauthorized alteration of users' IP addresses, which may cause IP conflicts and disable normal operations at the hospital. IP Lockdown restricts incoming traffic on a port to a specific IP address/subnet. Clients cannot access the network unless they are configured with valid IP addresses. This ensures that the entire network is substantially improved in terms of its security and reliability, and takes full advantage of ProCurve's unique Adaptive EDGE Architecture™.
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Central Hospital with a significantly improved communications and information delivery platform, providing speed, reliability and security and ease-of-use. The network has substantially accelerated user access to information and network administrators have also become more productive since they can monitor and manage the network from their own desktops.
"We chose ProCurve because its switches are stable and reliable, as well as extremely cost-effective, and are supported by a lifelong warranty including free maintenance," said Tang Yuhui, Director of the hospital's IT Division.
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The ProCurve Networking business unit of HP is a supplier of enterprise networking solutions comprising wired and wireless networking products, services and solutions—including WAN routers, Ethernet switches, routing switches, wireless access points and network management applications—which allow customers to build networks based on open standards that meet current and future needs for security, performance and reliability.
The ProCurve Networking Adaptive EDGE Architecture is a unique design strategy that creates a secure, mobile, multi-service network by placing intelligence at the edge-where users connect and policies are enforced. This innovative approach creates a dynamic network infrastructure designed to keep up with advancing technology and user needs while protecting business investments.
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Hardware
Software, Services & Support
- Lifetime warranty with next day advance replacement*
- Software updates, telephone and email technical support**
- Comprehensive network design and configuration services**
*available in most countries, on most products for as long as the original customer owns it.
*The ProCurve Routing Switch 9300m series and Secure Access 700wl series have a one-year warranty with extensions available.
**for the most up-to-date information go to www.procurve.com.
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When you are ready to explore the benefits a ProCurve Networking solution can offer you, call HP at 1-800-975-7682.
To learn more about ProCurve Networking's Adaptive EDGE Architecture™ solutions, visit our home page.
Purchase: HP business solutions, products, and supplies can be purchased at your local HP partner, or bought directly from HP either online or by calling 800-613-2222.
Finance: HP finance plans provide all the benefits of new technology without the risk or cost of ownership. For details, call 888-999-4783.
Accessibility: HP is committed to providing products and services that are accessible to people with disabilities. For more information, please visit the HP Accessibility web site or call 888-259-5707.
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