The Challenge
Harley Street has been experiencing positive growth following huge demand for their services and the management has decided to expand their footprint by taking up new projects and expanding current services offered by strategically acquiring new villas closer to the existing facility.
One of the key objectives has been to offer the best experience to their patients even in the newly acquired properties. The customer was also facing a challenge on bandwidth, since the addition of the new facility and integrating it to the network would bring about more workload on the existing core switches which were also nearing their end of operating cycle and support.
The Solution
SysSense identified the need for more bandwidth and switching capacity as the facility is growing; whilst there was also a need for ‘future-proofing’ the infrastructure for the next 5 years.
The team at SysSense proposed and successfully implemented the Cisco Catalyst series network switches for the core and access layer with a 10G ethernet backbone.
This helped ensure that there was suffcient bandwidth and enough room to deploy applications and network services with minimal latency. The core switches offer redundancy with dual uplinks from each access switch thus ensuring the uptime on the network.
Role played by Comstor
As a part of their role in the channel as a value-added distributor, Comstor extended their value to this requirement by designing the bill of quantities (BoQ), conducting the proof (PoC) of concept and ensuring timely supply of solutions and services to SysSense.
Outcome
The customer appreciated that the project was completed successfully with minimal disruption on the application and services. Another key aspect that the customer valued was the smooth transition during replacement of the core switches which could have been very complicated if it was not planned and executed well.
Suhail Paliath, Technical Manager at SysSense, praised the role played by Comstor in helping them successfully execute the project – and thanked Harley Street for giving them the opportunity to participate on their transformation journey.
“I’d like to thank IT manager Firoz Farooq and the rest of the management team at Harley Street Medical Centre for giving us the opportunity to collaborate together, and we look forward to working with them again in the future. I would also like to thank the Comstor team for their support in successful completion of the project”.
Firoz Farooq, IT Manager at Harley Street Medical Centre, highlighted how it was critical to have a robust and flexible IT infrastructure in a bid to be able to adapt and evolve to changing market dynamics and customer demands.
“In today’s world, a healthy IT infrastructure is essential to the success of any industry. But it becomes increasingly important when it comes to the healthcare industry, where ‘business as usual’ often involves saving people’s lives. In, IT these situations, the critical significance of the work we do from entering data on a patient’s file to alerting doctors to urgent needs necessitates that every component of our network performs optimally at all times”.
He also outlined that with advances in technology, the network of a typical healthcare business is both ever evolving and ever-expanding.
Illustrating that healthcare organisations had begun leveraging mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to handle tasks like accessing medical records and submitting prescriptions.
“If networks aren’t properly maintained, it can significantly compromise the quality of care to patients. IT services uptime and availability is the key to any medical facility and our patients deserve nothing but the best. We were about to hit the upper limit on our network infrastructure equipment, and we needed to ensure that we are taking the right decisions at the right time and foresee our needs in the future that will be a catalyst for our growth in the near and long term. The Cisco catalyst 9500 and 9200 were proposed and implemented by the SysSense team and they have satisfied all of our requirements of capacity, uptime & scalability”, said Farooq.
