As the Internet takes on a larger role within healthcare IT infrastructure, Ecessa, a provider of so-called “affordable” WAN link controllers for small-to-medium sized enterprises, today announced that The Research Institute for Children at Children’s Hospital in New Orleans selected Ecessa’s PowerLink controllers to manage its multiple Internet connectivity demands. 

 

With the PowerLink devices, the research staff is able to use the Internet reliably for daily productivity without any Internet downtime, company officials said.

 

“The Internet has become integral to the daily business of healthcare organization – with administrators, doctors, researchers and patients needing to be connected at all times. The healthcare industry sends vital research and patient information over the Internet, and they can’t afford to have connections go down, or perform poorly,” said Jason Breyer, vice president of sales for Ecessa.

 

According to officials at the Research Institute for Children, it was looking for a solution that would enable them to have automated Internet redundancy. They had only one Internet connection after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, and needed two Internet connections for greater reliability. The scientists and researchers from the Institute conduct work at various locations and they send multiple files throughout the day between these locations. For this research facility, reliability is crucial, they said, and if an Internet outage occurs, it can severely affect productivity.

 

“When an Internet link goes down that connects hospital and research facility employees, or patients accessing a facility from home, critical information may be lost, productivity will suffer and important files will not be delivered on time,” Breyer said. “PowerLink is purpose-built for all types of healthcare organizations, and research institutions find great value in deploying it for the reliability factor and performance improvements. The healthcare market has been a strong focus of ours, and one that continues to grow. As the Internet plays a greater role within the healthcare IT infrastructure, the need for our product becomes even greater.”

 

The children’s hospital required a solution that would enable them to automate the load balancing of traffic across multiple Internet connections – officials at the institute said – so that if one ISP had an outage or became bottlenecked, the staff would not be affected.

 

“It has really paid off for us. When one network connection bounces, the other connection stays up,” said Dawn Kelly, director of research information services. “We literally at this time have no Internet downtime. The PowerLink continually ‘heartbeats’ the Internet, and depending upon which Internet connection has the least amount of traffic, it will send traffic to that connection. It has allowed us to do all that we need, and at an affordable price.”

 

PowerLink was selected to expand bandwidth capacity while load balancing traffic between two Internet connections, utilizing two different Internet providers for additional redundancy, company officials explained. The Plymouth, Minn.-based company touts its products as “affordable,” offering WAN link controllers for WAN and ISP link aggregation, automated load balancing, failover and network security for SMBs.