Download Case study 1 – network design for ACMC Hospital

Case study 1 – network design for ACMC Hospital
This case study analyzes the network infrastructure of ACMC Hospital, a fictitious mediumsized regional hospital. The hospital has provided you with a short description of the current
situation and its plans. As a network designer, it is your job to identify all the organization’s
requirements and data that will allow you to provide an effective solution.
Organizational Facts
ACMC Hospital is a medium-sized regional hospital located in Acme County, with
approximately 500 staff members supporting up to 1000 patients. The hospital is interested
in updating its main facility (which uses equipment from various vendors) in its Layer 2
campus. You are meeting to define the client’s requirements.
ACMC has 15 buildings in total on the campus, plus 5 small remote clinics. There are two
main hospital buildings and an auxiliary building. The two main buildings have seven floors
each, with four wiring closets per floor. The auxiliary building—the Children’s Place—is
connected to the two main buildings; the switches from these three buildings are connected
with fiber connections in a ring. The Children’s Place has three floors, with three wiring
closets per floor. The other 12 campus buildings are smaller office and support facilities,
with 10 to 40 people per building, located on one or two floors.
The network architect is new to the hospital. The hospital is aggressively expanding its clinic
and alternative emergency room presence within Acme County. Due to population growth in
general, plans to enlarge the main campus are also under way. The hospital is doing fairly
well financially. It wants to selectively deploy cutting-edge technology for better patient care
and high productivity. Management is tired of network downtime and slowness affecting
patient care. Network manageability is important because ACMC has a tradition of basing
operations on small support staffs with high productivity. ACMC’s upgrade timeframe is 6 to
12 months.
Current Situation
The current network uses inexpensive switches from several vendors, purchased over time.
They comply with various standards, depending on when they were purchased. The switches
are not SNMP-manageable, although a small amount of information is available from each
switch via the web or command-line interface.
Within each of the three main buildings is a main switch. One floor switch from each floor
connects to the main switch. The other switches connect either directly to the floor switch
or via a daisy chain of switches, depending on which was most convenient at the time.
The small outlying buildings have one or two 24-port switches. One of these connects back
to one of the main building switches via fiber. If there is a second switch, it connects via the
first switch.
Currently, the staff VLAN spans the entire campus. No Layer 3 switching is present. The
address space is 172.16.0.0 /16. Addresses are coded sequentially into PCs as they are
deployed. Staff members have been meaning to deploy DHCP but have not had the time.
The applications that the organization is currently running include standard office
applications, plus some specialized medical tools running over IP. Radiology, Oncology, and
other departments do medical imaging. As these departments acquire new tools, they are
adding real-time motion to the highly detailed medical images, requiring large amounts of
bandwidth. All the new servers are capable of using Gigabit Ethernet or Gigabit
EtherChannel connectivity.
Many servers are currently located in various closets. Many lack uninterrupted power
supplies or proper environmental controls. A staff member has to roll a tape backup cart to
each server closet to back up each server. There are about 40 centrally located servers in
one raised floor “server room,” and 30 other servers distributed around the campus near
their users. The server room takes up part of the first floor of Main Building 1, along with the
cafeteria and other non-networked areas.
Hospital Support Services has been experimenting with workstations on wheels (WoW).
Moving these and plugging them into an Ethernet jack is just not working very well.
The WAN uses 56-kbps links to three of the remote clinics and dialup connectivity to the
other two. The one router uses static routing that was configured by a previous network
designer.
The staff members have frequently complained about slow response times. There appears
to be severe congestion of the LAN, especially at peak hours. The staff provided you with a
copy of its recent network diagram, which is shown in following Figure.
You believe that the current situation does not provide for future growth, high reliability,
and ease of management.
Plans and Requirements
The introduction of new applications will result in an additional load on the links to the
remote clinics. The expected tighter integration and growth of remote offices will even
further increase the traffic load on the WAN links. The hospital would like to upgrade the
WAN infrastructure to provide sufficient bandwidth between the remote clinics and
headquarters and, at the same time, find a solution for better convergence during network
failures. The company is aware of the drawbacks of its current IP addressing scheme and is
seeking a better solution.
The hospital must comply with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(HIPAA).
Case Study Questions
Complete the following steps:
Step 1 Document ACMC’s requirements.
Step 2 Document any information that you think is missing from the case study scenario and
that you consider necessary for the design.
Before beginning the design, you will need this information. Assume that you have talked to
the customer about the missing information, and document any assumptions you make. You
don’t need to assume that all the missing information is provided by the customer; some
might never be available. However, you do need to assume answers for your critical
questions.
Step 3 Outline the major design areas that you feel need to be addressed when designing
the solution for this scenario. List the tasks, and provide a brief comment for each.