St. John's Network Group completes switch upgrade

by Ann Bucy

SBJ Contributing Writer

This May, St. John's Network Group, a division of St. John's Health Systems' information systems department, upgraded to 3-COM switches to connect all of its workstations to the main network.

"The switches allowed us to rebuild our network backbone," said Michael Lofaro, the local-area network/wide-are network manager for the Network Group.

"There was a switching of packets. Packets are a conglomeration of information that's sent from one computer to another. The switch determines where the packet should and shouldn't go."

Lofaro said the 3-COM switches were installed because the product they had previously wasn't functioning properly. The 3-COM product was highly recommended by other users and had a strong background in ATM protocol.

He added that what amazed him about the new switches is that it only took 12 hours to install them.

Lofaro, his 15 employees and seven others representing 3-COM and LANTech "had to switch, or change out, over 5,000 computers and over 80 servers," he said.

"During the 12 hours, we also had to maintain connectivity with our mission-critical servers, like the labor unit. Those servers can't go down while we were doing this."

His job, along with the other employees, is to take care of the infrastructure for the St. John's network.

"We take care of any of the computers connected to the main computer," he said. "The work stations are all connected to the main computer through switches."

To get ready for the year 2000, Lofaro and his staff will be checking and upgrading St. John's computers, servers and software.

The group's other goal for the future is having a centralized database repository where all locations have the same information as the main office.

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