OREANDA-NEWS. NEC Corporation has supplied new network infrastructure utilizing software-defined networking (SDN) for Nagoya City University Hospital, an education, research and core medical institution serving one of Japan's largest cities.

The hospital utilizes NEC's UNIVERGE PF Series (ProgrammableFlow) to implement SDN and enable centralized network management by physically integrating and visualizing multiple networks that were formerly built for each department and system.

Technologies evolve rapidly in the healthcare sector. Deploying new medical equipment traditionally involves extensive work to change, test and verify system settings multiple times across a number of physical networks. With NEC's SDN-based solution, hospitals can easily connect new equipment to the right virtualized networks in minutes and visualize the overall structure of the systems and data flows that have been created.

Moreover, by virtualizing and pooling compute, store and network resources across departments, hospitals can also significantly reduce their capital expenditure and ongoing operational costs.

"SDN-based networks eliminate the problem of 'stranded capacity' with under-utilized switches and servers in some departments and the need for additional resources in others," said Jiro Kitakaze, deputed general manager, Solution Platform Business Division, NEC Corporation. "NEC has been able to reduce the number switches the hospital needs to run its network switches from 40 to just 8 and the number of server racks from 17 to just 6, which occupy 65% less space."

NEC's SDN-based virtualized network infrastructure will help the Nagoya City University Hospital continue to improve the very high quality of service it provides to patients by streamlining data sharing between the departments involved in their care and reducing workloads for medical and IT staff. It will also speed up the process of introducing new innovative equipment in the future with reduced ongoing support costs.