See a visible difference in network performance: sensitive records and rare analyses made smooth migration to a new network essential - Testing and Diagnostics - Laboratory Corporation of America's use of Visual Networks' Visual UpTime WAN management tool

Communications News,  Oct, 2002  

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The daily challenge of maximizing efficiencies of a legacy WAN network, while simultaneously meeting excessive growth demands on the network, early became an overwhelming task for Donald Barrow, data communications and network engineering manager, and his IT staff of eight at the Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp).

The LabCorp IT team is responsible for managing data communications for the company's extensive network of laboratories, which perform diagnostic procedures on approximately 280,000 patients each day. Since 1971, LabCorp has grown into a network of 24 clinical laboratories and approximately 900 patient service centers across the United States. The LabCorp IT team provides networking support for more than 19,000 employees who serve more than 200,000 clients in North America, including physicians, managed care organizations, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and other clinical laboratories.

Recently, the company signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dynacare, an independent clinical laboratory services company. Once completed, the agreement will further expand LabCorp's operations throughout the United States and Canada. With this additional growth, LabCorp quickly needed to adjust to the changing company and network needs, but was reluctant to abandon its existing frame relay network.

Much of LabCorp's sensitive patient, testing and research information feeds into two of LabCorp's Centers of Excellence, located in Research Triangle Park and Burlington, NC. At the Research Triangle Park location, LabCorp operates the Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology, and in the Burlington location, the Center for Esoteric Testing, where a wide variety of testing technologies perform the largest volume of rare analyses in the network.

In an effort to increase network efficiencies and improve management of new sites, LabCorp decided to migrate from a hub-and-spoke network architecture to a distributed network architecture supporting private IP VPN services. The network-based IP VPN service also allows LabCorp to take advantage of the cost and flexibility of IP, while leveraging the security of frame relay for sending sensitive, mission-critical information, such as confidential patient records.

To help ease migration pains and to guarantee that information continues to flow smoothly over vast networks, LabCorp employed Visual Networks' Visual UpTime WAN management tool as the technology to provide visibility into Layers 1 through 7 of its network-based IP VPN service.

"Having visibility directly into our network means we can determine how network utilization is affected as we implement network-based VPNs, and where additional bandwidth may be required or reduced to save network costs," says Barrow.

LabCorp also uses the product to support class-of-service validation, making certain that prioritized data, such as lab charts, has precedence over less essential information traveling over the network. "We have been able to improve data analysis over our data circuits," assesses Barrow.

LabCorp puts all new applications through intensive network analysis. With the emergence of new private IP networking capabilities and applications such as VoIP, LabCorp needs to be ready to "firefight" the dynamic network infrastructure.

"Now, we can see what the job is on the WAN and what is actually being deployed over the network. We can immediately identify any hiccups or congestion and quickly work to get our VPN working at maximum performance," Barrow says.

Acquisitions and corporate expansion go hand-in-hand with growing pains, particularly those concerning the network infrastructure's ability to maintain a high quality of service for current and future data communications needs.

"Due to the highly sensitive, mission-critical information that is transmitted over our networks, we needed a performance-management solution that would allow us to understand what happens to an application when it is deployed on the network," says Barrow.

Because so much data flows over the network 24x7, LabCorp uses its WAN performance-monitoring tool to investigate where the majority of the mission-critical traffic is coming from at any given time. "Certain circuits get filled up, and we need to know why this is happening," says Barrow. "Once we have investigated and pinpointed the problem, we can allocate more bandwidth so that our 1,000-plus sites are performing at the highest service levels."

The solution validates IP service-level agreements at the service boundary, tracks access line, port and IP circuit statistics, identifies the most active users, and measures utilization by protocol type. With these capabilities, Barrow and his engineering team know that their network-based IP VPN is working at optimal performance and that its mission-critical data is being transmitted in the most efficient manner to all of its network sites.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group