A healthcare network in Illinois is investing US$40 million in Alcatel-Lucent switches to consolidate data centres into a private cloud. Advocate Health Care is the largest integrated healthcare system in Illinois, and the largest emergency and Level 1 trauma network in the state. It employs 37,000 people and has more than 250 sites of care, including 10 acute-care hospitals and two children's hospitals.

With all of those facilities, Advocate needed to consolidate, centralize and virtualize IT operations to reduce costs and power consumption, increase availability and uptime, make the network more flexible and speed application deployment, said Gary Horn, vice president of technical services and CTO in Advocate's Information Systems department.

Source: Network World