Today, all the university’s facilities, including the hospital are located on the Trigoria campus. Twelve-hundred students attend courses ranging from medicine, nursing, biomedical engineering, food science and nutrition, radiology and radiotherapy. In addition, the hospital currently has 245 beds for both public and private patients and operates nine surgical rooms. Shortly, the hospital will expand to over 400 beds and 18 surgical rooms.
Three old buildings equipped with an ageing network infrastructure previously formed the original campus base at Longoni. After combining facilities on the Trigoria campus, the complex recognised the need for a more powerful networking infrastructure to satisfy the modern requirements of a contemporary university and centre of medical and educational excellence.
The hospital’s information system stores patients’ clinical records, digital images of x-rays, scans, and records for all meetings. A separate system stores student data and provides valuable information to aid their studies.
“We needed a reliable, high-performance networking infrastructure that can readily handle both information systems. It also has to unify communications within the hospital and facility buildings via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This technology will allow us to satisfy the service expectations of our patients and students. Moreover, any solution must have the flexibility to accommodate future needs, such as on-demand video and wireless technology,” says Marco Venditti, IT manager, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma.
At the heart of the ProCurve Adaptive Network solution, implemented at the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, are four next-generation ProCurve 8212zl series core switches. Based on the industry-proven HP ProCurve ProVision ASIC™, they are ideally suited to the campus’s requirements due to their reduced complexity, lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and they enable wired and wireless networking from core-to-edge, with unified security and management. The ProCurve Switch 8212zl is the industry’s first core switch with a lifetime warranty♦.
Two ProCurve Wireless Edge Services Modules (WESM) work with the core switches to deliver secure, advanced wireless services to the campus, simplified management and unified wired and wireless operations across the network. Two additional WESMs generate a redundant configuration. Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports provide connectivity and supplementary redundancy to the network.
Twenty-four ProCurve 5400zl series switches - with over 1,000 Gigabit Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports for IP telephony and wireless technology - provide intelligence to the edge of the network. Even though the campus has been equipped with 180 ProCurve Radio Port 230 units to satisfy its wireless technology needs, its network still has sufficient extra connectivity to allow further scalability and expansion. Furthermore, to improve communications and lower set-up and maintenance costs, the hospital has recently employed the ProCurve 5400 series switches to introduce 800 Cisco IP phones that employ both VoIP and wireless technologies.
Within the campus’s server room, two ProCurve 6200 series aggregator switches and seven ProCurve 3400 series switches, with their security, mobility and convergence capabilities, handle high-throughput applications, such as the university’s Intranet and Internet services.
To aid network management, ProCurve Manager Plus (PCM+), ProCurve Mobility Manager (PMM) and ProCurve Identity Driven Manager (IDM) software ensure a secure and manageable platform.
Thanks to the ProCurve IDM technology, The Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma now has a highly reliable, high-availability networking infrastructure that is easy to manage and which connects users securely to information across a unified wired and wireless, mobile LAN infrastructure.
Based on open standards, ProCurve switching solutions are versatile, less complex and adaptive to users and applications such as VoIP, video-on-demand and wireless technologies. This has allowed the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma to efficiently handle the convergence of applications such as VoIP, improving call clarity and reliability.
This solution typifies ProCurve’s Adaptive Network approach to helping organisations like the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma to evolve and respond to the changing business and technological needs prevalent within the Italian health and educational sectors. Furthermore, this technology enables the Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma to provide enhanced services to patients and students at a lower price/performance ratio than comparable proprietary products.
“At present our patients can view their medical records and even the menu-ofthe day and soon we plan to introduce television and video over the network so they can watch a wide selection of programmes. The ProCurve Adaptive Network solution is very easy to manage and TCO is 28 per cent lower. I am now looking forward to introducing ProCurve technology throughout the newly planned residential buildings,” concludes Venditti.
HP ProCurve is the Network of Choice for best-in-class solutions, products and services for wired and wireless networks. ProCurve's Adaptive Networks vision enables customers to implement an open, standards-based network infrastructure that adapts to the changing needs of users, applications and organizations. ProCurve was positioned in the Leaders quadrant in research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.'s 2008 Magic Quadrant Report for Global Campus LANs and is No. 2 worldwide in Ethernet switch market revenue and ports according to Dell'Oro Group.
Further information on ProCurve networking solutions and products is available at www.procurve.com.
Marco Venditti
IT manager
Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma
