Since we began this series of blogs detailing the impact that electronic health records (EHR) will have on your enterprise, Congress has passed its massive health care reform bill. This, coupled with last year’s HITECH Act—which included $19 billion in incentives for health care organizations to deploy EHRs—will provide the impetus that hospitals, physicians practices, insurance companies, independent laboratories, clinics and other medical entities will need to start or further their EHR rollouts.

However, as Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian points out in a recent article, the more patient data becomes digitized, the more likely security risks will grow. To overcome these threats, health care organizations must put their IT time and money into not just encryption, but protecting overall network access. The article points out that encryption “doesn’t mean you’ve protected medical information, because access control is the real issue. New cybercriminals do not do what the old cybercriminals did. They realize you’ll be encrypting the data and instead access the application and steal access rights.”

To counter this black hat offensive, health care organizations need to take a multi-layer approach to securing patient data in wired and wireless environments. While encryption is still be needed, network access control, intrusion prevention and end-to-end monitoring will be key components in avoiding EHR leaks.

For comprehensive security, network access control will have to be applied at the user and device levels. As we’ve mentioned in the past few blogs, IT will have to get very specific about policies, detailing who can view what parts of patient records in what environment. For instance, IT will not want a consulting doctor to be able to access a patient’s file once he is no longer on the case. That can be controlled through centralized management tools that control access rights. IT can also set policies that restrict medical personnel from accessing patient records from unprotected devices or via unprotected wireless networks. These tools can even let IT demand that only devices with a certain level of virus protection be allowed to view patient files.

In addition to network access control, a health care organization will need to be able to monitor, detect and remediate security issues that arise. To do this effectively will require management tools that can automatically gather and analyze log and event information from the hundreds or thousands of devices in the network. These tools must be able to consolidate information from wired and wireless networks into a single view so that IT doesn’t have to toggle between individual management windows to find common faults.

Once a vulnerability is identified, the management tools should be able to quarantine the device and either automatically remediate the problem, such as pushing an anti-virus software update or alerting IT so they can address the issue.

Finally, to achieve complete security in an EHR environment, IT must be able to audit and report on activities. If there is no overarching management system, then getting an accurate view of a healthcare organization’s security posture for auditors will be nearly impossible. A centralized management platform will enable IT to easily generate targeted reports that speed the auditing process and enable ongoing compliance.

Keeping all of this in mind as EHR rollouts begin or continue will ensure that patient records will be properly protected and safeguarded from malicious activity.

One of the most appealing aspects of electronic health records (EHR) is that patients, physicians, nurses and other healthcare system participants can access patient records at any time from any device. However, this wireless component means that IT managers will have to rely on the management and integrated security capabilities of a unified network access architecture to ensure that this flexible access is secure and bandwidth-efficient.

For instance, many hospitals today are becoming more visitor- and patient-friendly by offering guest access to the Internet. Eventually, that same network will be used by patients to check on the results of a recent lab test and other critical information.

IT managers are going to have to ensure that only authorized users can access these charts and that a users’ policy applies whether they’re connected via a wired connection or wirelessly. Therefore, they will need centralized management tools that can identify the request and match it to enterprise-wide role-based policies.

In addition, they’ll have to make sure that the data is not being accessed via a rogue access point that could jeopardize patient privacy. A unified network access approach that integrates sophisticated wired switching and wireless architecture that can handle voice, video and data can monitor the environment and alert IT to the emergence of unauthorized access points. IT will then be able to locate and shut down those rogue devices.

As hospitals, physicians’ offices and other healthcare environments expand their wireless networks in tandem with their EHR rollout, IT will need a unified network access platform with unified resource management software that can seamlessly manage both the wired and wireless switches, routers and other enterprise infrastructure. That way, they can apply patches, software updates and policies with ease to all devices in the network from a single console instead of having to update several unconnected systems. In many cases, they can actually integrate physical WLAN controller modules into switches in order to eliminate unnecessary appliances that consume power and take up valuable physical space.

They’ll also be able to set granular policies that enable them to allow a consulting doctor to access a patient’s record within the hospital’s wireless network, but not his office’s network. This level of detail is important for HIPAA and other privacy mandates.

Centralized management and a secure network fabric that protects from external AND internal threats will also help to ensure that wireless devices accessing the network are not carrying root kits, viruses or other malware that users may pick up outside the hospital firewall. IT can use network access control to scan all devices for appropriate anti-virus software and other security tools before they interact with patient data.

In addition to security, IT can also use integrated network monitoring modules that feed important data and alerts back to the centralized management platform to monitor and manage the amount of traffic in the wireless environment. An access point might work fine with a dozen people logging on to it, but if a whole hospital floor is trying to work within the EHR system via wireless devices, it could create a serious bottleneck. With the centralized management platform, IT would be alerted as access points hit their threshold so they could add more or set user and device priorities to control traffic.

Finally, wireless can pose challenges when it comes to generating reports on compliance. However, if the management tools can integrate data from the wireless access points and wireless switches with the wired network data, then IT can offer auditors comprehensive reports.

A recent article highlights the challenges of an inadequate wireless environment.  The article states that “most EHRs are designed to rely upon a consistent wireless network connectivity so as to bring the EHR to the point of care” and that EHRs “do not handle network ‘blips’ gracefully.”

As you see, for EHR to be securely and efficiently extended to wireless networks, IT must deploy intelligent and centralized management tools, as well as infrastructure that can handle both wired and wireless voice, video and data.

The final areas of the enterprise sure to be impacted by electronic health records (EHRs) are the branch office and the remote worker. Both tend to be at a distance from IT, and as a result present different challenges than their campus LAN and data center counterparts.

Let’s begin with the role that the branch office will play in an EHR rollout.  It’s quite significant since physicians’ offices outside of the hospital, clinics, imaging facilities and even partner billing companies are all a type of branch office for the health care system. They need to share data with the main network, but have to do so across the WAN.

To ensure the privacy of patient information and to comply with patient privacy regulations, IT must encrypt data end-to-end and create secure tunnels. This could be difficult without management tools that can recognize and manage routers, switches and other branch infrastructure as well as control access at the user and device level.

IT will require an overarching management system that can apply institutional and regulatory policies to branch office activities surrounding EHR. For instance, an MRI technician should be able to load a patient’s MRI image into his electronic record, but not be able to access his recent lab reports.  A sophisticated enterprise-wide management tool would be able to deploy, enforce and update centralized policies at the branch level.

Additionally, most hospitals don’t have a plethora of IT staff to handle branch technical issues. An automated, centralized and – in some cases – virtualized switching environment would help health care IT support the widespread use of EHR, and its expanded infrastructure, without having to add headcount.

Deploying these services in a multi-service router platform that supports routing, switching, security, voice and wireless replaces discreet devices, conserving valuable power and space.  A consolidated platform that can be pre-configured, shipped and remotely managed also reduces service calls and saves money as well as power and space in often constrained branch environments.

IT would be able to manage its branch infrastructure using a standard image monitored from a centralized console. Once that gear was up and running, IT could remotely and automatically push updates, patches and other critical maintenance tasks that would otherwise require on-site visits from tech staff.

If systems were somehow corrupted, IT could dial back to a recent stored image saved to a central repository – again, without having to send out a technician.

Such tools would also provide IT a single view of all branch devices from a central console, enabling concise fault analysis and remediation. These sophisticated management tools make it possible for one person to easily monitor and manage thousands of sites.

The same can be said of the remote user environment. IT could enable users such as home workers, independent diagnostics personnel, medical image interpreters and even patients themselves to access information within EHR systems without compromising security or privacy.

The centralized management system that controls the data center, campus LAN and branch offices can also be used to set policies for remote user and device access. For instance, IT could set rules that restrict diagnostics professionals from reading data on an unauthorized mobile device. That kind of granularity would ensure the highest level of productivity without risking data leaks.

These management tools would also provide incredible flexibility. Healthcare organizations could set up seasonal flu clinics that securely pull and push patient data in and out of EHR systems from remote, or even temporary, locations.

IT could also take advantage of centralized management to ensure that no single user or branch is saturating the network. By monitoring traffic closely, IT could improve capacity planning and budgeting for infrastructure upgrades.

The combination of intelligent management software and intelligent switches and routers would enable IT to easily and cost-effectively handle EHR rollouts to branch offices and remote workers.

In the next blog, we’ll dive into strategies for securing EHR in the wireless enterprise.

In the last blog, we tackled the challenges – and solutions – regarding electronic health records (EHR) in the data center. Now we’ll do the same for another critical component of the enterprise: the campus LAN.

To understand the obstacles you might face in deploying EHR in the campus LAN, let’s picture the various players you’ll encounter. Just as an example, let’s use a large city hospital. There, you’d find the main hospital with its various urgent care and residential care departments as well as physicians’ offices. You’d also have laboratories, billing, pharmacies and admissions.

Each of these players most likely has their own system for dealing with a patient’s medical information. Typically, these applications start up as skunkworks projects that ride on their own network. However, with EHR, you’re going to have to tie these systems together to share information. For instance, you’ll have to make it possible for a physician doing rounds in the hospital using his own office’s tablet PC to easily pull up the most recent MRI on his patient. In other words, you’ll have to take networks that have evolved organically and not only gain control, but also apply security and policy at the interconnects, or switches and routers.

In the past, you might have added a switch here or there to support these applications in a one-off fashion. You also probably relied on complex protocols such as Spanning Tree or Virtual Redundant Routing to tie switches together for higher availability and redundancy. The resource-intensive, real-time nature of EHR makes these protocols intolerable.

Instead, you’ll need a solution that lets you increase redundancy and easily scale your network as more and more campus players come online. You’ll need switches that can automatically “see” each other and fail over to one another in case of an outage or power cut. Your switching network must let you manage all switching resources as a virtual pool through a single console.

Important in this single-pane strategy is the ability to manage and secure your wired and wireless switching networks, including access points, as a unified whole.  Think again about that doctor on rounds with a wireless device. You’ll need to automatically control his access as he roams the campus.

To properly oversee your wired and wireless LAN, your switches should be able to apply policy at the user and device levels. For instance, you won’t want someone to be able to hack into a patient monitoring device and use it to access sensitive patient data, and you won’t want users in the laboratory to see a patient’s CAT scan results. Finally, you don’t want non-essential traffic, such as patient access to the Internet, to hog all of the network bandwidth. Centralized management tools let you set and enforce role-based policies campus-wide.

Chances are your EHR efforts will become a campus-wide initiative. To accommodate this growing number of endpoints, your switches should support Gigabit Ethernet at the edge with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core and multiple 10GE, or higher, capacity in the core. In the not-too-distant future, you’ll see 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet links between the core and data center as well. A high-capacity switch will let you increase your speed without having to rip and replace your infrastructure.

At the same time as capacity is growing, space for these switches is getting more and more constrained. Therefore, you need a switching environment that can fit into already crowded wiring closets. The switches will have to generate less heat and consume less power – both standard requirements for today’s campus LAN.

As the demand for EHR increases, so will the number of switches and devices in your environment. But we’ll bet that your budget will not increase to add staff to manage those switches. To ensure that you don’t overtax your staff, your switches will have to be easy to deploy and administer.

You’ll want to be able to create a master image of a switch and automatically apply it to other switches as they come online so you don’t have to use up staff resources configuring and testing each piece of hardware.  You’ll also need to be able to push out updates and patches from a central management console.

Lastly, your campus LAN switching environment will have to have embedded security, including 802.1X authentication and protocols that stop DHCP snooping and other damaging attacks.

With all of these requirements met, your campus LAN will be ready to handle the incredible challenge of deploying and managing EHR.

In the next blog, we’ll dig into how EHR will impact the branch office and mobile/remote workers.

We began our multi-blog electronic health record (EHR) discussion by talking about the urgent need for global deployment. Now we’re going to begin to dig down into the impact of EHR at each point in the enterprise. Nowhere will EHR have a greater impact than in the data center.

To understand the heavy burden the data center will carry in EHR deployment, you have to think of the ecosystem of players that are involved in EHR. Hospitals, insurance companies, laboratories, physician offices, clinics and imaging centers are among the numerous entities that will be accessing your EHR system to add and retrieve data.

Studying this, it becomes clear that you’ll need to accommodate this diversity via policy-based management, tight access controls, support for robust bandwidth and the ability to easily expand your network.

EHR is going to happen fast and it’s going to be widespread. Therefore, you’ll need to be able to quickly scale your data center architecture. Physically-oriented legacy infrastructure is too restrictive, expensive to acquire and costly to maintain to make it a viable choice in the world of EHR.

The best way to handle the EHR revolution is to deploy purpose-built infrastructure that flattens out your architecture and can be easily extended, managed and secured. Included in this approach is a virtualized switching fabric that gives you the reliability and failover you’ll need with EHR. Think about how many patients, payers and healthcare workers will be dependent upon your data center infrastructure. Application downtime will be intolerable. Without access to a patient’s EHR records, a patient could be misdiagnosed, a duplicate test could be ordered or an insurance company could be billed incorrectly. All of these outcomes have dangerous and/or costly repercussions.

With a virtualized switching fabric in the data center, you’re able to weave together all your resources into a single, logical pool. If a failure should occur, redundant infrastructure components and network services can take over with no user impact. You can also easily add switches to the pool. That’s the kind of reliability and scalability that you’ll need as EHR takes hold around the world.

Another critical aspect of broadening your network is the ability to control device and user access based on policy. The only way to do this effectively is through centralized management tools. These tools allow you to set limitations on how and from where users can access information. You can also granularly manage system-to-system access. For instance, an insurance claim system would not be able to access physician notes and the physician offices would not be able to see hospital billing information. This type of built-in security will help users gain confidence in the EHR system and ensure compliance with U.S. and global privacy regulations.

There is no doubt that once EHR gets under way there will be an enormous amount of data, including large image files, passing through your data center. To avoid bottlenecks, you’ll need infrastructure that can support 10 Gigabit Ethernet and higher. 10 Gigabit Ethernet has the added benefit of enabling you to consolidate your switches and network interface cards, which can lead to a reduced data center footprint as well as lower power and cooling expenses. So despite the fact that you’ll be bringing on a resource-intensive application, you’ll have minimal impact on overall data center resources.

In the next blog, we’ll discuss the impact of EHR on the campus LAN and how you can plan now to handle it with ease.

A recent article in BusinessWeek stated that as health reform in the U.S. struggles, hospital chains and insurers will take it upon themselves to fix some problems by buying up their weaker competitors. “If legislation can’t bring costs down, consolidation might,” the authors contend.

They point to an American Hospital Association statistic that one-third of the nation’s community hospitals had operating losses in 2008. It doesn’t take a health care professional to conclude that that kind of “bleeding” can’t continue.

So let’s assume this consolidation will happen. The result, according to the article, will have to lead to organizations becoming more cost-effective and providing a higher quality of care.

Separately, the United States government, via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has allocated $1.2 billion to assist the healthcare industry with the implementation and use of EHR. According to the Center for Digital Government, that money has been split almost evenly between creating regional extension centers where hospitals and clinicians can seek help with selecting, acquiring, implementing and using certified EHR systems, and supporting the development of mechanisms for information sharing within an emerging nationwide system of networks.

State entities that receive the money will have to “develop and implement up-to-date privacy and security requirements; develop directories and technical services for interoperability across states; coordinate with Medicaid and public health programs to enable information sharing; remove barriers that hinder effective HIE; and ensure an effective model for HIE governance.”

Already, 40 such entities from across the country have been selected to receive grants, including the Alabama Medicaid Agency, the Michigan Department of Health and the Hawaii Health Information Exchange.

What the two issues – corporate consolidation and a government push toward health IT exchanges – signal is incredible momentum toward electronic health records. EHR is attractive for its potential cost savings and efficiencies as well as its ability to improve patient care. EHR will also help private health care companies, public health care systems, physicians, insurers and other participants in the industry communicate more effectively.

It was noted in a recent iHealthBeat article that nearly all primary care physicians and half of the hospitals in Denmark use EHR. The New England Journal of Medicine says only 17% of U.S. physicians and 10% of U.S. hospitals have deployed EHR.

The reason this is so interesting is that, according to this article, studies have found Denmark to have the most efficient health information system in the world. It saves physicians an average of 50 minutes per day in administrative work – that’s almost a whole hour!

Granted, as the article points out, the U.S. health care system is subject to far more privacy laws and the country is much larger, but imagine gaining even a fraction of that for each cog in the health care system wheel. Pretty impressive.

These clear benefits are why we are excited about EHR, regardless of whether it is public or privately funded or the size of the government or corporation deploying it. We’ll dedicate the next few blogs to the exploration of infrastructure challenges you, as an IT executive pioneering this exciting new technology, will face.

We’ll talk about them from the vantage point of the data center, the campus LAN, the branch/remote clinic, and the mobile user. Each area has its own unique challenges regarding architecture and security.

If there are any topics you’d like to see us cover, feel free to let us know.

In the previous blog, we started our discussion about energy efficiency – a key component of the next-generation data center – by addressing the need for real numbers regarding consumption. But just as important as having this information is communicating it to the right people.

Sound familiar? Your hospital needs a new clinical system, so the network team specs out the proper hardware based on performance requirements and then has it shipped to the data center. It isn’t until the gear arrives in the data center that the facilities team is aware of the additional power and cooling needs of the new infrastructure. This, despite that fact that the facilities team is most often the team responsible for ensuring that there is enough energy and HVAC to keep the infrastructure going. And it is usually the facilities team that has to account for electric and other utility costs in its budget.

Doesn’t sound very fair, does it? Or very cost efficient? What if that new gear needs just enough power that the electric grid would be considered at capacity? Or what if the HVAC system needed to be upgraded to account for any new hardware? Both situations could delay the rollout of your clinical system and, therefore, jeopardize patient care.

The better strategy is to identify who in the data center and the overall physical plant are responsible for supplying energy and HVAC to the building as well as the entire organization. Establish a virtual energy-efficiency team with these folks so that when you are making hardware purchases, you can run the real-world numbers you’ve gathered by them.

Armed with this information, this “green” team can determine whether the data center has enough energy and HVAC resources to handle any increased demand. If not, you might be able to scale back your plans before users are impacted by delays or poor performance.

This team could also begin to research the Energy Star program and Green Grid tools noted in the previous blog to gain an understanding of the actual consumption within the data center. It may become clear that if you upgrade to newer, more energy-efficient servers and switches, you could extend the life of your existing data center and avoid an expensive expansion.

Together you could also develop guidelines for purchasing and deploying new gear that could expedite rollouts. For instance, by having the facilities teams involved at the time of purchase, they could have floor space, power and cooling all mapped out by the time the new equipment arrives.

Most importantly, you’ll be tuned in to any changes in how power and cooling are supplied to the physical plant. For instance, you’ll know if there are plans to make part of the data center run off solar energy or to use more energy-efficient cooling systems. The cost savings from going green might be able to help fund strategic, revenue-generating projects.

It’s also likely that your superiors will be impressed that you took the initiative and reached out to the facilities teams to save money, streamline business processes and improve patient care. In this economy, that’s a very good thing.

In this last part of our discussion about evolving to become a next-generation data center, we’re going to tackle the ubiquitous topic of energy efficiency. We know you’re getting bombarded with questions about how “green” your data center is, and as you seek budget for resource-intensive applications such as electronic medical records and real-time diagnosing, you’ll need real answers.

Deploying these projects in a time of tight budgets and even tighter data center footprints (i.e., lack of real estate and power grid resources) will take some strategic planning on your part. Somehow you have to roll out systems that will contribute to the bottom line without sending power and cooling costs into the stratosphere or requiring so much more data center space that you have to build a whole new facility. Both of these approaches negate whatever revenue might be gained from these exciting new projects and are considerably environmentally un-friendly.

Add to this that Nemertes Research says it won’t be long before data centers are maxed out energy-wise. “By the end of 2010, more than 50 percent of large data centers will reach maximum power consumption levels, leaving consumers in a major energy crisis as these organizations will be unable to scale data operations to support their business needs,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, senior vice president at the research advisory firm.

So how can you avoid this outcome? The answer is twofold: Know the real energy consumption your data center infrastructure—including servers and switches—will require, and communicate that information to your data center and physical plant facilities teams.

Let’s start with having real numbers. Antonopoulos warns that the lack of data center resources will mean that “power efficiency and accurate data on power consumption is absolutely vital for the future.”

“To avert this crisis, organizations need to not only measure their own data on power consumption, but also, they need to begin demanding that vendors disclose all product efficiency data in order to serve as a key criterion for customers who are choosing the tools that will best provide them with sustainable next-generation data centers,” he says.

Too often, network teams base their projected power and cooling architectures on vendor data sheets. But these on-paper numbers do not always reflect how the products will perform under the rigors of your unique data center environment, and the inevitable discrepancy can present serious problems. If you overprovision resources, you’ll end up spending more than you need and impacting the energy efficiency of your data center. Underprovisioning will leave you scrambling to bring in more power and cooling infrastructure, which can impact network performance, drive up costs and potentially force you to unnecessarily add on to your data center.

What you should be using to gauge the energy impact of network gear on your data center are real-world numbers. This way, you can accurately assess whether you can eke more from your raised-floor data center. Since the cost of a new data center is estimated to start around $20 million, working with real-world power and cooling requirements is essential.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take a big step in making this possible come June when it plans to extend its Energy Star program to data centers. According to the IDG News Service, the program will offer incentives for organizations to make their data centers more energy efficient and offer tools to track the results of conservation projects over time.

“Data centers that take part will use an online tool that ranks their efficiency on a scale of 1 to 100. Those that score 75 or higher can request an audit from the EPA, which then awards the Energy Star certification,” the article states.

The author points out that the Energy Star program is also recognized in Europe, and that China and India have agreed “in principle” to use the EPA’s system to rank products. Andrew Fanara, the program’s lead at the EPA, is quoted as acknowledging that avoiding a patchwork quilt of regional programs is important, especially for multinational companies.

Some vendors have even started certifying the energy efficiency of their own products. For instance, independent testing firm Miercom offers its “Certified Green” program to provide vendors with an objective assessment of the environmental impact and business case effectiveness of their product as compared with national indices.

Organizations hoping to nail down some stats on their energy efficiency today can use the online resources at The Green Grid. There you’ll find a power configuration efficiency estimator, a data center design guide, a presentation on real-time energy consumption measurements in data centers, and other valuable tools to help you better understand how to manage your energy demands.

You can also alleviate your concerns about energy efficiency via a flattened architecture, which we’ve referenced in previous blogs. By moving from a three-tier strategy to a two-tier one, you’re able to shrink the number of devices and interconnects in the data center floor consuming floor space as well as power and cooling resources.

Being proactive about energy efficiency ensures that your organization won’t have to choose between spending money on power-hungry network infrastructure that might tap out the grid and force you to construct a new data center facility versus purchasing a life-saving, state-of-the-art CAT scan machine. You’ll be able to show healthcare executives that not only are you choosing to be green, but you’re also saving green—money, that is—in the process.

In our next blog, we’ll talk about the second half of the energy discussion: planning power and cooling needs with your data center and physical plant facilities teams.

However, it’s understandable why you’re holding onto this type of architecture – to unify, you’d need an underlying network technology that could handle the unique demands of all three environments. Gigabit Ethernet alone is often not robust enough to deal with the I/O requirements of HPC and large-scale SANs. Fibre Channel and Infiniband are expensive technologies that need highly trained staff. In a time of tight budgets, the double whammy of costly hardware and training is not a recipe for success.

Over the next few years, you’ll see the adoption of a unified network fabric based on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) as it evolves and becomes more commonplace in network gear. FCoE enables large data centers dealing with tremendous traffic and storage loads to preserve the benefits of Fibre Channel, which has a strong installed base, while taking advantage of the ubiquity of Ethernet deployments and common skill sets.

Although work on the FCoE standard was finalized last year, there are still significant components that need to be completed to ensure the reliability that users have with traditional Fibre Channel. For instance, there are protocols in the works still to deal with congestion notification, enhanced transmission selection and priority-based flow control. All of these are working their way through the IEEE’s standards process.

As you wait for these piece parts to be settled out, it’s important that you start to look at the most critical element of FCoE’s success – 10G Ethernet. For FCoE to be able to handle the load as gracefully as its counterparts, it needs the workhorse that is 10G switching. Think about the I/O you’ll need to handle electronic medical record requests, backup and storage. Or how much power you’ll need to deal with real-time diagnosing using medical images and other hefty files.

The migration to 10G Ethernet in the near term offers you many benefits beyond the future support of FCoE. Since 10G delivers 10 times the bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet, healthcare organizations can reduce the Gigabit Ethernet NICs they need in highly virtualized environments. Rather than use as many as four to eight Gigabit Ethernet NICs in each server, you can deploy just two 10G Ethernet NICs and achieve full redundancy and availability while increasing bandwidth per virtual machine.

Consolidating around 10G, Gigabit Ethernet network I/O also dramatically reduces the number of Gigabit Ethernet ports, upstream switch ports and cables you need to deploy and manage. And it puts you in line with the goal we’ve outlined over the past few blogs – a flatter network architecture. As a bonus, fewer ports and switches lead to reduced power and cooling.  Both of these outcomes are the essence of the next-generation data center.

In the last blog entry, we talked about the importance of flattening out your healthcare organization’s data center architecture from a three-tier to a two-tier model. But that is just one step in simplifying your data center – the other is to deploy a centralized management methodology.

Centralized management is a critical component of the next-generation data center because it will reduce the complexity of managing this collapsed network you’ve created.

In a recent conversation with Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president at the Yankee Group consultancy in Boston, he stated that “hospitals are going through a tough time right now. They are trying to improve patient care through innovation, but are finding it to be difficult because the ecosystem of doctors, patients, medical suppliers and insurance companies are all on separate networks.”

Moving away from managing your switches, routers and other network devices individually is essential to boosting the efficiency of your data center. It’s also necessary to cost effectively meet the twin demands of compliance and security.

It’s important that as you look for a centralized management tool, you make sure that it can interoperate with the myriad network and security devices in your data center. Otherwise, you’ll heighten the level of complexity instead of lowering it.

With this tool, you should be able to create a policy and automatically deploy it to the entire enterprise. It should also allow you to update and add policies with ease.

A state-of-the-art centralized management tool will offer a single pane of glass so that you can monitor and manage your network in one window and not have to call up multiple management programs. It will also offer updates on the “health” of your network, determining if patches are up to date, software versions are correct, and security software such as anti-virus is in effect.

Centralized management is important not just for your enterprise today, but as you move forward. Consider Fraser Health in Vancouver, British Columbia. This healthcare organization has a dozen acute care hospitals and more than a hundred other medical offices. It has gone through several mergers in the past decade and has worked hard to unify many aspects of IT under a single umbrella.

The IT team attempted to manage the converged networks manually, but soon found it too overwhelming. “When you do things manually, there is a lack of consistency and reliability gets sacrificed,” says manager of network services Mike Lindsay.

Instead, he is deploying a centralized management tool to ensure standardization across all the organization’s sites and to develop and maintain a consistent image among all hardware and software. In addition to the security and stability this move will have on the data center, it will also positively impact costs. Lindsay says centralization and automation will allow Fraser to redirect IT resources that would have been tied up with manual configurations and oversight to be used on more strategic projects.

This type of innovation is helping Fraser and other healthcare organizations stay competitive with a next-generation data center.