H3C Builds a High-Speed Network for Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City

Client introduction

Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City is formerly known as Shanghai Yan'an Hospital before it was moved to Kunming in 1970. For more than two decades, Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City has inherited and carried forward the outstanding tradition of Shanghai Yan'an Hospital and has developed into a large general hospital integrating medical treatment, teaching, scientific research, emergency treatment, and prevention.

Currently, there are more than 1,400 employees in Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City. The hospital has 39 clinical and medical-technical departments. More than 718 beds are available. About 400,000 outpatient visits and more than 13,000 inpatient visits occur annually. In 1993, it was awarded as a baby-friendly hospital in China.

Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City has two research centers in Yunnan Province: Kunming Cardiothoracic Surgery Research Center and Kunming Hemodialysis Research Center. It also has two important departments in Yunnan Province: heart surgery department and gynecology department. With more than 100 senior technicians and 543 intermediate technicians, the hospital has a large pool of talents and a strong technical force. The hospital attaches great importance to scientific research work. Over the past two decades, the hospital has won 88 national, provincial, and municipal awards for scientific and technological achievements, and has published 1377 scientific papers in various academic journals around the world.

Current network status and network building goals

In the first phase of the network building in Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City, a Gigabit backbone network has been built. However, the original network faced limitations including single point failures, limited coverage, and difficulties in unified management of the devices of multiple vendors.

The network reconstruction goal of Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City is to build a highly reliable and high-performance network infrastructure platform. This platform can ensure the stable operation of the Health Information System (HIS) and meet the demand of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and other medical imaging systems for the bandwidth and performance demands of high bandwidth networks.

Technical solution

Considering the current and future application needs of the network, Yan'an Hospital of Kunming City adopted two H3C S9505 next-generation 10 Gigabit routing switches as the core switch to expand the original network. With high performance, great scalability, and carrier-grade reliability design, the S9500 switch has been recognized by many clients and applied on a large scale in many industries such as the carrier, education, medical, energy, and large enterprises.

The two H3C S9505 switches in the central equipment room achieve redundancy and backup with the Gigabit bundle. In the future, the interconnection bandwidth can be upgraded to 10 Gigabit to further improve the processing performance of the network. The original C4507 core switch is used downstream as the convergence switch of the finance department to fully protect the original investment of the client. Meanwhile, a modular and high-density S5516 Gigabit switch was applied in the cardiothoracic department. Both S5516 and C4507 switches were docked to the dual core with dual link attribution, using dynamic protocols to achieve load sharing and backup functions. This prevents any impact of a single point failure on the operations of key departments in the finance and cardiothoracic departments.

The H3C S3026E/S3050 switch is selected as the Layer 2 access switch. It has a fixed configuration of 24/48 100 Megabit ports with line speed and 2 Gigabit expansion slots. For the network building, the Gigabit uplinks were all configured to build the Gigabit backbone network and realize 100 Gigabit desktop line-rate access.

The S3026E/S3050 switch can support the stacking of up to 16 devices, which is not only applicable to stacking modules but also supports mixed stacking of different devices. This provides clients with a smooth expansion method to protect their investments.

The H3C S3000 full series switches also support the 802.1X authentication function. It ensures that only authorized users can access the network, prevents unauthorized users from invading the hospital system, and ensures the security of hospital operation data and patient information. The S9505 switch can be used as an 802.1X authentication server or a DHCP server to reduce user's investments in servers. For clients who already deploy an authentication server, the S9505 switch also supports the relay function for authentication messages and DHCP messages, which enables flexible networking.

For the original network with devices from multiple vendors, H3C's network management software can be integrated with third-party network management platforms. It can take advantage of the integration features of multi-vendor network element management software and network management platforms to provide clients with a unified network management interface. The graphical management interface provided by H3C makes daily network maintenance and operation simple, convenient, and efficient. It can also simplify network management significantly.