Case Study - University HealthSystems
Founded in 1984, the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) is an alliance of the clinical enterprises of 87 academic health centers.
UHC helps members pool resources, create economies of scale, improve clinical and operating efficiencies, and influence the direction and delivery of health care.
The Network
Company- wide, there are over 500 network nodes with approximately 1000 active IP addresses in use. There is a layer 3 switched network in place with 28 separate VLAN's to segment traffic both functionally & geographically.
Each floor was given their own subnet and they had to worry about how to allocate and manage the addresses.
The Problem
The network administrator was spending over 4 hours a week manually updating spreadsheets, and various text files. This resulted in an unreliable network. When duplicate IP address were allocated by mistake, it caused network problems while the rogue machine was tracked down.
The Challenge
To find an affordable IP management system that would allow for accurate and reliable tracking of statically assigned IP addresses.
High-end IP address management solutions were dismissed by UHC because installation is too complex and costly. However, Easy-IP cut the mustard as it is extremely intuitive to use and is set up in less than 30 minutes.
The Benefits of Easy-IP
The integrated SQL database within Easy-IP is a self-tuning, and requires no assistance from a dedicated database administrator.
Easy-IP uses a multi-threaded network discovery process to find live hosts and automatically populates the database. All IP addresses within each subnet in the central database are easily viewed in the management window. Information can then be viewed and sorted by hostname, brand of NIC card, MAC address, etc.
Says, Steven Carlberg, Network Administrator at UHC, "We had rather a complex IP infrastructure, with many VLANs but Easy-IP allowed us to create and partition dozens of subnets with just a few mouse clicks, and reduce IP address conflicts to zero. Easy-IP also acts as a significant part of our network documentation."
The Return on Investment
After only 10 weeks, Easy-IP has proved to be an excellent investment for UHC. Estimated labor costs alone, before the implementation of Easy-IP, were $10.00 per IP address each year.
At roughly 1,000 active IP addresses, the annual labor cost on IP address management was over $10k. After implementing Easy-IP, the per-IP address cost has gone down to less than $1 per year, translating into an annual IP address management cost of less than $1,000.
In the first year alone, it is estimated that Easy-IP has saved UHC over $9,000.
