Tallaght hospital outsources LAN contract

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The Adelaide, Meath and National Children’s Hospital (AMNCH) in Tallaght has outsourced the maintenance of its LAN to PlanNet 21 Communications.

The decision was taken to outsource management of the network as there were not sufficient resources in-house to perform a task of this scale. The hospital now has over 1,500 users and in excess of 3,000 network points. Under hospital policy, every user has access to e-mail and users can log on to PCs anywhere in the building.

In addition, the network is absolutely critical to the hospital, said Derek Kelly, network administrator. All hospital records are computerised, even though outpatient details are initially issued on paper. ‘If any part of the system is down, basically the hospital can’t function,’ he explained.

PlanNet21 provides a round-the-clock monitoring and maintenance service from its Kilcarbery network operations centre. Under a service level agreement with the hospital, if any part of its network fails, PlanNet 21 will be able to fix the problem within two hours.

Kelly paid tribute to PlanNet 21, which has already been called upon since the contract was signed. ‘We’ve had fantastic service. They’ve done all the configuration for us and any adds, moves or changes we make, they verify beforehand,’ he said.

The hospital is in the process of upgrading parts of its network to Cisco equipment. Currently all of the uplinks from the edge to the core are on Cisco hardware. Some of its existing LAN and wireless networking systems had become obsolete and are due to be replaced. ‘We’re going for a complete Cisco solution,’ Kelly told ComputerScope.

In order to improve its IT security, the hospital is also putting in place a series of virtual LANs. Each edge closet on the network is being separated into a virtual LAN. However Kelly said there were no plans to adopt IP telephony at the hospital.

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