Shutterstock’s transformation began four years ago, when it moved from a single data center in New York to a distributed data center with facilities in Massachusetts, Texas and Washington. Fischer’s team added a core network consisting of Juniper Networks EX4200 Ethernet switches with EX2200 rack switches in a single core.
“We thought it was going to last for a pretty substantial period of time,” Fischer says. It didn’t.
As Shutterstock built out a new cloud-based storage system for its millions of images, it needed more capacity to handle the volume of traffic traveling between data centers. Fischer’s team considered replacing or outsourcing the network, but they opted instead to fortify what had already been put in place and move toward a software-defined network.
Then, earlier this year, Shutterstock launched an upgrade using Juniper’s virtual chassis technology to add EX4550 switches to the existing core, expanding its capability from 4 gigabits per second to 10Gbps.
“Every network upgrade I had previously done, there was this major forklift where you cut all your services over all at once, and even with all the planning in the world, it never goes well,” Fischer says. “This was an interesting approach where we weren’t ever really tearing down our existing core. We were just bolting on new functionality.”
Except for a five-minute outage when the IT team rebooted the core, “we were able to do it without any substantial impact to customers,” Fischer adds.
Once that was complete, Shutterstock moved to the next stage of the upgrade: installing large firewalls, Juniper SRX3600s, to handle the increased bandwidth and throughput. The IT team used the new core to route traffic in and out of the network, one IP address at a time, which took about six or seven hours.
“That was the harder part of the network upgrade — performing the cutover from the old to the new,” Fischer says. “There’s always the possibility for error, but we were able to avoid that, and it went smoothly because we were able to use some creative routing and move services one at a time to the new firewalls.”
Infrastructure upgrades aren’t always precipitated by the need for more computing resources and greater network throughput. Sometimes there are legal or collaborative reasons, for instance, that prompt an SMB to take on such a project.
Eyes on the EHR Prize
A few years ago, Central Eye Consultants in Mount Pleasant, Mich., started to crystalize a new vision for its future due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. ARRA requires that all medical offices adopt electronic health records by the end of 2014. An EHR upgrade made sense, explains Corine Binder, who manages the ophthalmology practice. “It’s easier to find files, everything is legible, and it is easily backed up and stored.” And, she adds, “it was going to be mandated anyway.”
Office management decided to implement new enterprise practice management (EPM) and EHR systems. But Binder soon learned the office’s aging infrastructure wouldn’t support the new software. With employees inputting more information than ever before and accessing digital files regularly, there was a major spike in demand on the network.
Central Eye Consultants started looking into new hardware, mindful that their needs would likely grow in the near future. They went from three old workstations to 10 HP 6000 PCs spread across the exam rooms, physicians’ offices and the front desk. They also added an HP 6000 Pro-Tower E8500 fax server, an HP ML350 G6 Tower application server and an HP Ultrium storage solution.
“Everything went really well,” Binder says, and employees instantly noticed a difference. The computers were much faster, and the EPM and EHR systems transformed operations. “We increased productivity,” she says.
Staff no longer had to spend time finding and filing charts and inputting duplicate data on each patient visit. “We increased our patient load probably by 20 percent, and we haven’t changed our hours at all,” Binder says.
Unified Communications Help Offices Come Together
Like Shutterstock, Thurston Kitchen & Bath in Colorado had stretched its infrastructure about as far as it could go. But unlike the former, the full-service kitchen design firm and wholesaler and retailer of cabinets, countertops and appliances had systems that were, as Thurston Vice President Mark Schmidt puts it, “just about as mid-20th century as you could get.”