University Taps Dark Fiber for Online Academics, Healthcare

Everything is big in Texas--including networking challenges. Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has to provide quality network service to five regional university campuses and almost two dozen healthcare centers across the state. At the same time, it has to meet the diverse needs of its users while balancing regulatory requirements.

Originally anchored on T1 circuits, The Texas Tech University Health Sciences network began as a modest WAN with 150Mbit throughput. Today, it has a 1Gbit WAN with LANs on its campuses that run 10Gbits of throughput. The network supports 22,000 patients, 10,000 users, 200 departments within the university, facilities in 60 different buildings, and 23 healthcare clinics throughout the state of Texas.

When designing the new network, Dr. Chip Shaw, VP of IT and CIO at Texas Tech University Health Sciences, had to bear in mind the dual--and diverse--needs of both academia and healthcare.

"The academic campuses wanted to leverage the expertise of professors throughout the system through online education that the network would transport--and they needed to do this in a fairly open security environment," said Shaw. "With healthcare, many of our medical schools worked with different teaching hospitals and EMRs [electronic medical records]. There was a need to collaborate and to integrate all of this information from diverse sources in a secure environment that met HIPPA security standards."

The Push for Online Education

The academic online education initiative would require videoconferencing, a technology that Health Sciences has used going back 15 years. When designing the new network, however, Shaw and his team were looking to implement a state-of-the-art system.

The goal from the academic side was to enable students to be able to take advantage of the professorial talent at the university, no matter where the students--or the professors--were located. "For example, there is a professor in Amarillo who also teaches on our other campuses--and also other professors on other campuses that teach students through the Texas Tech system," said Shaw. "An online videoconference delivered over the network can be attended by any student, regardless of location."

The installation of high-definition videoconferencing required a move away from T1 circuits to 264-bit standard IP. When issues arose with the new IP network, Health Sciences was able to pinpoint the cause of the problem using Network Instruments' Observer network management system.

"We immediately noticed issues with our new IP network," said Shaw. "We were able to uncover these issues with the QoS we had begun to implement."

The QoS tools tagged every communications packet. This gave Health Sciences IT the ability to actually look inside each packet to find the problems, which were eventually traced back to a codec. "This ability to drill down into suspect packets...assisted us with our goal of presenting quality videoconferencing for our online classes, since the quality of videoconferencing is directly related to the number of packets in network communications that don't get dropped," said Shaw.

Healthcare Integration

On the healthcare side of the network, there were also major challenges because different schools of medicine, teaching hospitals and EMRs had to be integrated.

"There were seven different EMRs alone," said Shaw. "Some of these EMRs were software residing at the hospitals, while others were cloud-based. We recognized quickly that we were going to need a highly reliable network that could work all of these systems and offer full redundancy. This led to our decision to move into a high-speed ring-architecture network with superior redundancy and availability."

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The ring architecture network project began in 2011, and today it is about 50% complete.

"We spent the first year getting the network from Lubbock into our learning infrastructure," said Shaw. "Once this was in place, we began implementing the new network at the regional campuses. Part of the phasing of this project has also been dependent upon existing contracts that we have with communications providers that are still in force."

Next page: Lord of the RingTexas Tech University Health Sciences found that it was not alone in its pursuit of higher speeds, wider pipelines and greater reliability. Indeed, a large number of academic institutions in Texas wanted better data throughput and higher network speeds for both education and research. These institutions pooled their buying power to lease dark fiber, providing network speeds 10 times better than most of the organizations were getting.

"Today we have 10Gbit circuits on our wide-area network that both the health sciences center in Lubbock and Texas Tech University's various academic campuses use," said Shaw. "Health Sciences and the university work closely together, and we also partner with other universities in the region."

To date, Texas Tech University Health Sciences has seen a 40% savings from its network collaboration with other universities--a savings that is continuing to grow with the network buildout.

"The new ring architecture also gives us network redundancy that we didn't have before," said Shaw. "We formerly operated on a hub-and-spoke network architecture, where the hub was a potential single point of failure. Today our network payloads are carried on diverse paths in the ring architecture that link both the health sciences facilities in Lubbock and the various Texas Tech university campuses. This ring architecture provides redundancy, failover and greater reliability in our network."

Going forward, Health Sciences wants to segment the network so it can implement different security zones for academic and healthcare users.

"Like most academic systems, we have had a secured perimeter, but our network has fundamentally been open," said Shaw. "The next phase of network security is to segment our network security based upon user requirements. In healthcare, for example, there are strict security guidelines that HIPAA mandates. These guidelines differ substantially from the more open network security standards of academia. We need to segment our network, and to put in place different security policies and protocols for these two sets of users."

Now that he has been through several major phases of network building, what recommendations does Shaw have for others undertaking similar projects?

"Especially in the academic environment, you need to first build support for the project before you tackle it," said Shaw. "This requires constant communication with all of your user groups and active engagement with the users in defining network requirements and how the network will work. Academic leaders also need to understand the strategic direction and goals of the network."

Shaw added that it's important for organizations to take their time.

"One thing they should know is that a project of this magnitude doesn't happen overnight," he said. "We want to implement the network in a series of smaller step pilot projects and do our debugging at this point--because by the time the entire network gets rolled out, there should only be minor technical issues."