Nottingham City Hospital is one of the largest acute teaching hospitals in the UK’s East Midlands, with a staff of more than 5,000. It offers a wide range of clinical services to the population of Nottingham and to patients from further afield.

Nottingham City Hospital has to work hard to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare services. As part of its drive to improve efficiency, it identified a need to transmit X-ray, scanner and ultrasound images across its local-area network (LAN). This would permit consultants, whose offices are dispersed across the entire hospital site, to view images on their screens rather than wait for copies to be delivered on paper. However, the existing network—which was stretched to its limits—did not provide enough bandwidth. The hospital therefore decided to install a new 3,500-node Gigabit Ethernet network.

“We wanted to implement a network that people could use to transmit whatever they wanted, at any time of day or night,” said network manager Mike Ross, Nottingham City Hospital.

In the face of competition from 3Com, Cisco and Intel, the hospital chose to base its new network on switches from Procurve Networking.

“HP’s reputation for reliability was an important factor in our choice, but the most striking thing about the Procurve switches was their excellent price/performance. This translated into a low initial investment, which was backed up by minimal maintenance costs,“ commented Ross.

Having confirmed the reliability and ease-of-installation of the ProCurve switches in a pilot exercise, the hospital went ahead with a full implementation. It has installed a single routing switch and over 100 Layer 2 switches. HP OpenView and HP Toptools are used to manage the network. Procurve Networking provided technical advice in the early stages, with Specialist Computer Centres and Xpert Systems Limited supplying the hardware and software, but implementation was the responsibility of an internal team.

The new network provides a tenfold increase in bandwidth, with the result that extremely large data files containing moving images can be sent anywhere on the site. This enables consultants and others to work more efficiently.

“Users are very happy with the network. The cardiac surgery group is buying an extra scanner because it is able to get through its workload much faster. This should help it meet government targets for reduced patient waiting times,” said Ross.

Because faulty parts are replaced by HP at no cost, the hospital’s annual maintenance budget has been cut by £10,000 in the first year and will continue to reduce. The network has also proved to be extremely reliable.

“Over the past two years we have had no downtime and no major faults. Bearing in mind that we are growing the network all the time, this is a very notable achievement. Personally, I am very impressed with the HP switches,” concluded Ross.

• Keep pace with demand for more healthcare services
• Support effective round-the-clock working with an always-on network
• Implement higher-bandwidth network capable of transmitting X-ray, scanning and ultrasound images

• Install new 3,500-node network based on ProCurve Networking by HP switches
• Source network hardware and software from two HP partners – Specialist Computer Centres and Xpert Systems Limited
• Use internal team to implement network solution

• Tenfold increase in bandwidth permits scanning data to be transmitted quickly to any location on the site
• Cardiac surgery group is processing its workload more quickly, thus improving its chances of meeting government targets for reduced waiting times
• Annual maintenance budget has been cut by £10,000 and continue to reduce
• No downtime and no major faults over a two-year period

• Price/performance of switch technology
• Minimal maintenance costs
• Large, stable company with a good reputation

Company: Specialist Computer Centres
Headquarters: Birmingham, UK
Founded: 1975
Telephone: +44 121 766 2690
Number of employees: 4,000
Annual revenues: £1.2 billion (EUR 2 billion approx.)
Business: Value-added reseller, specialising in corporate and public sector systems
Products: HP, Compaq, IBM, Toshiba systems

Company: Xpert Systems Limited
Headquarters: Warrington, UK
founded: 1984
Telephone: +44 1642 751000
Number of employees: 240
Business: Provider of information and communications technology services

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