HIPAA compliance requires that healthcare organizations make every reasonable effort to protect patient medical records. Electronic health records, often including high-resolution digital imaging, must be available at multiple locations at all times, and be protected against natural disasters and malicious behavior. As a result, data replication requires secure, high-performance network connectivity to link healthcare professionals and critical information, whether across town or across the country.

Challenges

There are three key challenges. First, database replication applications exchange tremendous amounts of data.  Even modest hospital groups must transfer more than 100 GB per day—a level of data transfer that IP-routed Wide Area Networks (WANs) have difficulty supporting without significant packet loss and packet retransmissions. Second, database replication is very sensitive to network latency. Storage systems employ block-mode data transfers for which IP-routed WANs are particularly ill-suited. And perhaps most importantly, network reliability is paramount—downtime can cost lives.

Solution

Healthcare applications such as Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR) have unique and demanding WAN requirements, so they must have a high-bandwidth, inter-site communications network architecture with the lowest possible latency, the highest availability, and the ability to adapt to any application. And it must be affordable and easy to implement and manage.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena's adaptive optical network solution is a practical architecture ideal for networked remote storage, leveraging technologies such as Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), optical Ethernet transport, and storage over SONET/SDH. An adaptive network optimizes and switches traffic at the lowest possible layer—providing the lowest latency, maximum throughput and applications transparency. As a network that is always available and never drops packets, these flexible networks connect healthcare providers with critical information, exactly when and where needed. Solutions from Ciena's adaptive network architecture are qualified by all major storage vendors, including EMC®, IBM®, Hitachi Data Systems®, McData® and Qlogic®.

Benefits

• Provide real-time access to information by interconnecting remote data centers and healthcare professionals
• Any-distance database replication—even transcontinental and transoceanic
• Protect patient data from man-made and natural disasters
• Unmatched reliability: Up to six-9s (99.9999%) availability (less than 31 seconds of unplanned downtime per year).
• Lowest latency and maximum throughput
• Lower bandwidth costs up to 70% via multi-protocol hardware-based data compression, efficient protocol mapping, dynamic bandwidth allocation and the ability to consolidate multiple applications over a single leased WAN line
• Applications transparency minimizes expensive and time-consuming applications tuning and debugging for application rollouts, software updates, bug fixes, etc.
• Lower hardware costs by eliminating external switching/routing equipment for many scenarios