Hospital Network Infrastructure

[thisthat1]

Hello,

I need to gather some general information about network infrastructure in hospital. Things like which network devices we need and generally how much load each department creates in our network (e.g. the operation room, the reception, etc.) and how much bandwidth we should allocate to that special room. It would be alo very nice if you tell me how I can calculate the load for each machine (i.e. computer connected to the network). Or any good reference books or websites.

Thank you very much,

Pat

[mfurnival]

Hi,

That is a big question to answer - if you are looking to get an inventory of network equipment then there are a few discovery tools like Cisco CNC or Netformx which will trawl your network and then create a database of hardware, software, modules etc. You can then upload it to Cisco and it will tell you when products are going EOL/EOS etc. Neither tools are free though.

As for measuring utilization you could take a look at MRTG which grabs interface stats via SNMP and puts it in a nice graph so you can see how much bandwidth is being used - MRTG is free. Other tools like Solarwinds and Scrutinizer (which aren't free) can do the same tasks.

[thisthat1]

Thank you very much for your time :-)

[Leo Laohoo]

how much bandwidth we should allocate to that special room

I'm no expert with hospital environment but we've started rolling out Gig ports switches with PoE+ support and 10Gb uplinks to the hospitals here.  Some of the reasons are the uptake of video streaming and high definition media files that are coming online.  Gone were the days when you have to physically look at x-ray templates on in front of a lighted cubicle.  Nowadays the films and negatives (ranging from x-ray, ultra-sound, MRI, etc.) are stored in a bank of servers and streamed up to desktop.

Due to the proliferation of wireless we now have to consider putting wireless access points and associated support equipments (WLC/WiSM, WCS, MSE,  Wireless VoIP phones and RFID tags). 

Due to the nature of hospitals, our switches comprise of 3750E and 3750X with 6500 and Sup720.