"In health care, if you lose some transactional data, that's money that's lost," Billingsley says. "There's also the clinical data: What goes into the electronic medical record goes into the patient's chart. So you've got both types of data you're trying to protect."
Another factor that spurred Baptist Health to put site-to-site mirroring into place was the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law that imposes stricter data management requirements on health organizations. "The HIPAA regulations require increased security," Billingsley says. "But if you don't have the data, you can't secure it."
Before it installed the DWDM network, Baptist Health had used multiple T-1 lines between its data centers, which made site-to-site data replication a complex and time-consuming task. A DWDM network is literally several thousand times faster than the T-1 leased lines: Where a T-1 runs at a pokey 1.5 Mbit/s, the DWDM network can operate at up to 10 Gbit/s per fiber pair. Baptist Health has six fiber pairs per location (for more on this technology, see our recent report on Storage Over Optical).
DWDM lets Baptist Health run multiple protocols over the same fiber pair, including Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, and even the PBX voice traffic. Moving to its own dark fiber network also meant it didn't need to keep paying the local exchange carrier, BellSouth Corp. (NYSE: BLS), for those T-1s.
Here are before-and-after diagrams of its metro-area network configuration:
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