When the University of Utah Health Sciences Center had to choose core routers for a new Gigabit Ethernet network, manageability and performance were its key considerations. After all, the network is an electronic central nervous system for the center's 3,000-plus employees, medical faculty, and students.

After turning on the network Aug. 2, "we actually could see what was going through that switch or router, or who was doing what," says Jason Traeden, network engineer at the health center in Salt Lake City, which encompasses a hospital, medical college, and numerous clinics.

The health center replaced an older 10-Mbps asynchronous transfer mode network at the facility, selecting two BigIron core routers from Foundry Networks Inc. over products from several other vendors. The decision was based on comparisons of their performance, management tools, reliability, and support for several specific applications, including multicasting, security, and voice.

The features the center looked for are typical of those most large organizations need on their networks, although in a time of reduced technology spending, most companies are upgrading existing routers to obtain the features they need. This trend means that overall router sales are falling, according to vendors and analysts.

"We had a large ATM enterprise network and wanted to go to a Gigabit Ethernet-style network," primarily to reduce costs, Traeden says. In its nine-month replacement project, the health center took out $1.6 million in ATM equipment and put in a router network that cost a total of $500,000 to $600,000, about a third of the cost of the ATM network.

After going live this month, "we have a much cleaner, easier-to-manage environment, which has been a nice relief," Traeden says. The health center uses the sFlow packet sampling feature of the Foundry routers to collect and send sample packets and packet-flow information to a server, where engineers monitor the network and collect statistics.

The health center already used multicasting to distribute videotaped medical lectures and other digital data files around its campus, and it started using that feature on the Foundry routers right away. But it also made sure that the new routers had enough processing power and built-in support for the advanced security features and voice-over-IP services that it eventually will need, Traeden says.

Like most high-end routers, Foundry's BigIron offerings have more processing power than earlier generations, which translates into more memory for larger routing tables and advanced routing functions as well as support for functions such as IP version 6 and the Border Gateway Protocol, Traeden says.

New patient confidentiality rules required by the federal Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act will force the center to upgrade network security, so it made sure that its core routers could handle security features such as access lists and active control lists without hurting routing speeds, Traeden says. And when the Utah state university system that oversees the center decides to implement voice over IP, the center needs to be ready. "Voice over IP is coming, so we made sure that the equipment we have supports it," through features such as voice support with quality-of-service functions and bandwidth management, he says.