OhioHealth, one of the largest healthcare providers in Ohio, has installed a new storage area network (SAN) and a new optical transport platform based on Cisco Systems' technology to improve data storage and connectivity between its central business office, two main data centers, a surgery center, and major health centers and hospitals.

The new solutions provide the high bandwidth necessary for transporting medical images and the scalability required to support growing data needs. Combined with EMC network storage solutions, the new data storage solutions help to provide OhioHealth medical staff and employees with highly available data wherever and whenever they need it. With the broadest set of data center solutions in the industry, Cisco's Data Center 3.0 architecture provides a framework designed to create reliable, secure, scalable, and green data centers. The Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision aims to transform the data center into a virtualized environment providing anytime, anywhere access to content on any device.

Based on Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors, the new SANs connect the main data center with a secondary site, enabling synchronous data replication between data centers, and providing OhioHealth with highly reliable backup and disaster recovery capabilities. In addition, OhioHealth deployed a new cost-effective optical transport system using Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) with reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology, which enables the IT department to perform wavelength provisioning across entire networks. Together these Cisco and EMC solutions have helped the OhioHealth IT department to achieve lower total cost of ownership, enhanced resiliency and greater agility.

"We evaluated different storage networking vendors to determine who provided the highest functionality and overall interoperability and Cisco was by far the best fit," said Jim Lowder, vice president, Technology for OhioHealth. "In addition, the Cisco ONS solution performs like a LAN-type connection, running at 10-Gigabits-per-second, and it was very cost effective compared to other solutions we investigated. The end result is our ability to efficiently manage, properly protect and quickly access critical clinical information."

These results are representative of the benefits Cisco customers are experiencing across the globe, and Cisco is committed to delivering additional innovative capabilities to support customer requirements. Planned innovations for the Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors include: transparent upgrade to 8-Gigabits-per-second Fibre Channel interfaces; high-performance, scalable, intelligent fabric applications; and support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). FCoE offers flexible support for unified data center fabrics while providing investment protection for existing storage networking technology. The Cisco MDS 9513, 9509, and 9506 chassis will support these new capabilities without any limitation or need for a major upgrade, delivering higher bandwidth per slot and helping to ensure continued investment protection for existing customers. Scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 2008, the new 8-Gbps switching modules will be demonstrated in the Cisco booth at EMC World in Las Vegas.

"It's vital to OhioHealth to invest in technology that delivers the best overall value along with the IT capabilities we need to provide efficient, high-quality patient care," said Lowder. "At the same time, investment protection is a key part of controlling IT costs, so the ability to easily upgrade to future technologies like 8-Gbps Fibre Channel and FCoE is very important as well."

Another innovation from the Cisco MDS 9000 Family, Storage Media Encryption (SME), provides encryption and seamless management across multi-vendor tapes and virtual tape libraries), supporting customer requirements for regulatory and privacy compliance by helping to ensure that confidential information is not compromised if a storage tape or disk is lost or stolen. By encrypting data in the network fabric, customers improve performance and eliminate the need to manage separate standalone encryption appliances. Cisco also worked with RSA, The Security Division of EMC, to develop a solution combining Cisco SME with RSA Key Manager as a centralized solution for encryption key lifecycle management. Cisco SME is designed to work as seamlessly as possible with existing backup applications and is now generally available through Cisco's storage partners.