Case Study: Blood Systems Relies On Juniper Networks Integrated Security, Access And Data Center Acceleration Solutions To Give Life To Its WAN

Blood Systems, one of the country's oldest and largest blood service providers, has been offering its life-giving services throughout the Western U.S. Through its non-profit community blood centers—United Blood Services and Blood Centers of the Pacific—the company provides blood, blood components and special services to patients in more than 500 hospitals in 18 states ranging from California to the Gulf Coast and from Texas up to the Canadian border. The organization is second only to the American Red Cross in blood collection.

Blood Systems relied on a frame relay network to connect each of the company's sites to a data center that ran email, blood banking applications and other general office applications.

"The contract with our carrier was up, so we wanted to upgrade the bandwidth and the technology we were using," says Jeff Stephens, network engineering manager at Blood Systems. "We decided to switch to an MPLS network, so we put out a competitive bid." The existing edge routers were old, and Blood Systems decided to upgrade its routers in conjunction with the WAN upgrade.

Blood Systems wanted to optimize its network for business value, migrating to the latest WAN services to increase flexibility and to support business continuity requirements so that the nation's blood supply wouldn't be interrupted in the face of a natural disaster or pandemic.