Baptist Healthcare System

The Customer

Baptist Healthcare System, Inc. is one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in Kentucky. The company owns five acute-care hospitals with more than 1,500 licensed beds in Louisville, Lexington, Paducah, Corbin and La Grange, and manages a 300-bed acute-care hospital in Elizabethtown.

Baptist doctors, nurses, administrators and staff rely on the IT network to perform daily business functions and support applications that allow them to provide the best care possible for their patients. Essential to maintaining availability of the IT network are domain name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment (DHCP) and IP address management (IPAM) services.

The Challenge

Baptist began looking at Infoblox in 2005. At the time, for DNS and DHCP services, Baptist Healthcare was using Nortel’s NetID. While Baptist liked Infoblox products, they were not in a position to purchase or replace their existing infrastructure until 2007 when their Nortel product was reaching end of life. The IT department had been following the development and evolution of Infoblox appliances and knew Infoblox would be on the short list of appliances they would consider.

In 2007 Baptist narrowed its replacement options and conducted a 9-month comparison. The following is a list of several important requirements considered during the evaluation:

• Stability, redundancy and the user interface; Baptist weighted stability as most important. The IT department also looked for a product that was feature rich.
• Tech support, company strength and compliance reporting/audits and alerts.
• Conversion, disaster recovery and cost.

The Solution

“One of the things we liked was that Infoblox was the first to market with their core network services appliances,” said Mark Flynn, Lead Network Engineer, Baptist Healthcare System, Inc. “We knew that there would be a strong DNS component given that Cricket Liu was a part of the development team. We liked Infoblox’s strong linage and that they have been part of the evolution of DNS.”

“When we initially reviewed the other products, their claims and features looked nice,” said Flynn.“However, the products were difficult to use and cost quite a bit more than Infoblox.”

By mid 2009, the Baptist IT department completed testing. The scores were tallied and Infoblox was the clear winner.

Baptist purchased and deployed 2 Infoblox-550’s for each hospital for redundancy and 2 Infoblox-1050’s for their main data center to serve as grid master devices, all connected and managed as a unified system with Infoblox Grid technology. The conversion to Infoblox went off without a hitch.

The Result

In June 2009, the Infoblox appliances were fully installed. Baptist has now converted to a stable and supported product that allows for updates with the click of a button.

Concluded Flynn: “Healthcare IT is evolving and becoming more real-time. In healthcare, we cannot afford down-time with our network. With our old systems, we frequently experienced interruptions requiring NetID service restarts. And, unfortunately, for many years we were vulnerable to DNS-related issues because we were not running the latest release of BIND. Now, using Infoblox appliances in high availability pairs, and taking advantage of the Infoblox’s Grid™ technology, we have an added layer of redundancy in our datacenter. We love the one-button upgrades Infoblox provides and above all, with Infoblox, we simply no longer have to worry about reliability issues or security vulnerabilities crippling our network.”