Thailand: Department of Medical Sciences Upgrades Network for Future Growth

Background

Thailand's Department of Medical Sciences (DMSC) is part of the Ministry of Public Health and is responsible for research on medical technology relating to matters of public safety and health. DMSC's existing network links six buildings in a campus-like environment. The department uses its network for communications, knowledge exchanges and resource sharing for health technology research with government hospitals, research labs and other Ministry of Public Health departments across Thailand. But as an aging system it cannot offer the scalability and future upgrade path that a growing organization like DMSC requires to support the provisioning of future services like VoIP, video conferencing and wireless. These services can help DMSC provide greater communications and data sharing for research into medical technology.
 
 DMSC is an essential part of Thailand's public health care system and for it to be able to continue to provide quality service, the department needed to replace its existing network with a more cost effective solution that provides better performance, security, reliability, scalability and easy management. After a thorough evaluation, DMSC selected H3C to provide design and deploy its new campus-wide network.


Technology Solution

DMSC's campus network in Bangkok comprises six buildings. H3C built a three-layer network solution to accommodate the different requirements for each layer and a core switch in each building. All of this had to be accomplished within strict budget limitations. The H3C solution divides DMSC's network into Core, Distribution and Access layers.  A S8500 series switch was chosen for the Core layer due to its high performance and fast packet switching capabilities. The S8500 series switch features a redundant engine, two redundant power supplies, and hot swappable and passive backplane for industry leading reliability.
 
In the Distribution layer, H3C deployed six S6500 series switches in each building. The S6500 series gives DMSC carrier-class reliability and security with its high-density, wire-speed 10Gbps interfaces, which are ideal for deploying networked services. The S6500’s large capacity, modularized L2 and L3 wire-speed forwarding performance and ability to support abundant services at an extremely cost-effective price point fully met the tight budget restrictions of DMSC. 

At the Access layer, DMSC required a very high port density capability to provide comprehensive Gigabit Ethernet capacity throughout the networked buildings. To handle that requirement, H3C installed 127 S3026G switches supporting 3,000 fast Ethernet ports. The S3026G switch offers wire-speed forwarding and complete security management built-in.

    
Why H3C?

H3C provides DMSC with a high performance network that offers a more cost effective price-per-performance ratio to accommodate their budget requirements. H3C offers DMSC the trusted dependability they wanted with its redundant equipment designs that guarantee network uptime and improve reliability. Its modular S6500 series switches gives DMSC greater scalability for later growth with a clear upgrade path while the S3000 series switches offer the high port density required to support 3,000 fast Ethernet ports across six buildings. In addition, the Quidview Network Management System provides full-featured controls for simple, centralized management of network resources. With the H3C network solution, DMSC can deploy multiple e-services across its network cost-effectively while meeting the performance, reliability and security demands of its researchers and staff.

Benefits

As the Thai department responsible for medical technology research and safety, DMSC required a large switching capacity and wire-speed forwarding capabilities to empower the department's delivery of cost effective e-services supporting voice, video and data communications while also offering cost-effective solutions for its bandwidth, security and performance issues. With H3C's components, network administration, overall speed and accessibility of network services, like VoIP or video multicasting, have been improved giving DMSC a more scalable, cost-effective and manageable network. DMSC's network deployment went smoothly backed by H3C's professional service and support staff.