Belfast City Hospital enjoys benefits of future-proofed intelligent infrastructure management system
A future-proof intelligent infrastructure management system has been supplied by Tyco Electronics to Belfast City Hospital.
An intelligent infrastructure management system based on Category 6 cabling has been supplied to Belfast City Hospital by the AMP NetConnect division of Tyco Electronics, working with installer Black Box Network Services. Located on a 32 acre campus, the hospital’s focus is the development of cancer and renal services for the region. The hospital is internationally known for its comprehensive cancer-research programme, which has led to a partnership being established between the National Cancer Institute of the United States and both parts of Ireland. An Oncology Centre was developed last year, and the hospital also has four wards with a total of 84 beds, significant outpatient services and space for complementary therapies. Within the Oncology Centre, the client required a robust and future-proofed communications network that was capable of running virtual local-area networks (VLANs) for each medical specialist division and system. As well as running a VLAN for general PC use for e-mail, file sharing and access to hospital systems, separate VLANs were required for LinAcs (machines delivering radio-therapy to patients) and cancer centre imaging. VLANs were also required to allow other medical groups in the Cancer Centre to access systems across the wide-area network of the Health & Personal Social Services — such as local health trusts and the radiography physics section of the Northern Ireland Regional Medical Physics Agency. As the system involved the administration of several different networks, some of which are used for patient treatments, it was vital that the client could monitor the physical status of the network with the best accuracy and minimal downtime. It was also necessary to be able to manage the risk of network faults and maximise uptime and reliability. The network also had to have ample resilience to maximise resistance to faults and failures and provide the ability to recover quickly. Another requirement was future proofing — to provide sufficient capacity and quality to satisfy initial demand and potential requirements of future technologies. The final solution consisted of a Category 6 connectivity-management system with software providing the management tools to monitor and administer all moves, additions and changes on the network. The project began by connecting the Oncology Centre to the main hospital using a blown-fibre backbone linking each of the 12 communications locations. Internally, the building was flood-wired over 6 floors with category 6 cable providing four outlets to each workstation. There are 3200 active outlets. the cables were terminated in 42U open patching frames using a double presentation on intelligent patch panels connected to Cisco switches and, in turn, to the connectivity management system. CAD graphics provide details of every floor plan and closet location data. Monitoring software gives detailed asset identity, exact location and connectivity information on every IP and voice device — around 6024 points. All physical changes, authorised and unauthorised, to the network are monitored.
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