The 10-Gbps server connections will help to ensure that critical patient and healthcare applications won’t slow down as network traffic increases,” Ramsey says. “Application responsiveness is critical, because delays in accessing medical images or patient history, for example, have the potential to affect patient outcomes.

1. Customer Case Study
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 4
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
WELLMONT HEALTH SYSTEM
● Healthcare
● Kingsport, Tennessee
● 6500 Employees
BUSINESS IMPACT
● Prepared for increased traffic from
virtualization
● Improved availability of critical healthcare
applications
● Managed 250 server ports from single
interface
● Eliminated 122 fiber channel ports, avoiding
increase in lease costs
Hospital System Prepares for More Physician Order Entry
Wellmont Health System used Nexus platform to increase bandwidth while lowering cable costs.
Business Challenge
Wellmont Health System ("Wellmont") is a premier healthcare provider
in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia. Founded in 1996, the
system includes eight full-service hospitals, seven of which are acute-
care hospitals. Wellmont has more than 6,500 employees and a
hospital staff of nearly 600 physicians who offer a broad scope of
services ranging from community-based acute care to highly
specialized tertiary services, including neonatal intensive care, two
trauma centers and a Top 50 cardiac program.
Like many healthcare providers, Wellmont has adopted computerized
provider order entry (CPOE) as part of its overall strategy to improve
the efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery. To help demonstrate
“meaningful use” of CPOE, one requirement of new U.S. federal government regulations, Wellmont needed to
upgrade several key components of its electronic medical record (EMR). The IT team viewed the upgrade as an
opportunity to rethink the data center architecture in Wellmont’s mirrored data centers, which also host the picture
archiving and communications system (PACS), other critical patient-care systems, and important hospital business
applications. “Healthcare providers need very agile IT solutions to meet dynamic growth requirements and
government mandates,” says Kent Petty, chief information officer for Wellmont Health System. “We decided to
prepare ahead of time for increased network traffic instead of waiting until it began to affect application performance
and end-user productivity.”
Solution and Results
Wellmont built a scalable, highly available data center network using the Cisco Nexus
®
platform. The CPOE and the
EMR applications reside on eight server racks containing a mix of bare metal and VMware ESX servers. The servers
have QLogic converged network adapters (CNAs), which connect using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to
redundant Cisco
®
Nexus 2232 Fabric Extenders at the top of the rack. All 16 fabric extenders consolidate into a
“Healthcare providers need very agile IT to meet dynamic growth
requirements and government mandates. We decided to prepare ahead
of time for increased network traffic instead of waiting until it began to
affect application performance and end-user productivity.”
— Kent Petty, Chief Information Officer, Wellmont Health System

2. Customer Case Study
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 4
single pair of redundant Cisco Nexus 5020 Switches. These switches connect to the core network through Cisco
Catalyst
®
6509 Switches, and to storage through a pair of Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Directors, each with three 8-
Gbps links that form a 24-Gbps port channel. For disaster recovery and business continuity, Wellmont replicates data
bidirectionally and synchronously between the two active-active load-sharing data centers using Symmetrix Remote
Data Facility (SRDF).
Main benefits of the Cisco Nexus platform for Wellmont include:
● High availability: “Dual top-of-rack Cisco Nexus 2232 Fabric Extenders with redundant power supplies are
essential in our environment, because outages can affect care delivery,” says Darren Ramsey, director of
technology for Wellmont Health System. “We’ve already upgraded software in all of our Cisco Nexus switches
using the ISSU [In-Service Software Update] feature, and it worked flawlessly. It’s reassuring to know that we
could apply a patch outside our downtime windows if necessary.”
● Cable consolidation: The new servers connect to the Cisco Nexus 2232 Fabric Extenders with just two
lossless 10-Gbps Ethernet cables instead of the 10 1-Gbps Ethernet cables and two 4-Gbps Fibre-Channel
cables needed in the previous environment. Cable count decreased by 80 percent, and Wellmont has
eliminated 100 cables for each group of ten servers. Wellmont is also able to use lower-cost Cisco SFP+
Copper Twinax cables and Cisco Fabric Extender Transceivers.
● Switch port consolidation: Consolidating all server-based 4-Gbps Fibre Channel connections into a 10-
Gbps Ethernet FCoE connection decreased the Cisco MDS 9506 Multilayer Director port count by 60 percent.
“If we hadn’t adopted the Cisco Nexus platform, we would have had to modify our SAN switch lease
“The 10-Gbps server connections will help to ensure that critical patient
and healthcare applications won’t slow down as network traffic
increases. Application responsiveness is critical, because delays in
accessing medical images or patient history, for example, have the
potential to affect patient outcomes.”
—Darren Ramsey CCIE #18814, Director of Technology, Wellmont Health System

3. Customer Case Study
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 4
agreement to pay for more ports,” says Ramsey. In addition, by using the 8-Gbps Fibre Channel switching
modules, Wellmont needs just three instead of six ports to create a 24-Gbps port channel.
● Simplified management: Rather than individually managing 16 top-of-rack switches, the IT team now
manages just four Cisco Nexus 5020 Switches, two in each data center. “The Cisco Nexus 5020 acts like a
virtual chassis for all connected fabric extenders,” Ramsey says. What’s more, the IT staff needed no
additional training because the NX-OS software is a hybrid of the SAN OS and Cisco IOS Software they
already use with Cisco MDS 9506 Directors and Cisco Catalyst switches. The Wellmont IT staff has used the
Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch virtual port channel (VPC) feature to enable Layer 2 multipathing to a pair of Cisco
Catalyst 6509 Switches, and N-Port Virtualization (NPV) to simplify the storage area network.
● Simplified disaster recovery through virtualization: With a 10-Gbps Ethernet data center network,
Wellmont now has the foundation to virtualize all applications. If the main data center has an outage, the IT
team will be able to move virtual servers over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to the
disaster recovery facility using the VMware Site Recovery Manager. This capability eliminates the need to
implement different disaster recovery plans for different applications.
● Business agility: “The 10-Gbps server connections will help to ensure that critical patient and healthcare
applications won’t slow down as network traffic increases,” Ramsey says. “Application responsiveness is
critical, because delays in accessing medical images or patient history, for example, have the potential to
affect patient outcomes.
Ramsey concludes, “With the Cisco Nexus platform, we know we can quickly provision as many servers as we need
to meet a new business requirement. We have the bandwidth capacity to handle the unexpected.”

4. Customer Case Study
© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 4 of 4
For More Information
To find out more about the Cisco Nexus platform, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus.
To find out more about the Cisco MDS 9000 platform, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/storage.
To find out more about Cisco Data Center Business Advantage solutions, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/dc.
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