“Because there is no server to manage or underlying operating system to maintain, the Infoblox appliances allowed us to reduce the resources we spent on delivering DHCP and DNS services, while increasing overall reliability.”
—Frank Rodriguez, Network and Information Security Manager at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine
The University of Miami (UM), Miller School of Medicine, an academic medical center founded in 1952, serves Miami, South Florida, South America, and the Caribbean in education, research, patient care, and community service. Serving more than five million people as the only academic medical center in South Florida, the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine has earned international acclaim for research, clinical care, and biomedical innovations.
Each year the medical school’s more than 700 faculty physicians have more than a million patient encounters in primary care and more than 30 specialties. In addition to their Jackson facility, UM clinical facilities are located at the Miami Veterans Affairs Medical Center, five primary care centers throughout Miami-Dade County, and a half-dozen area hospitals. The School of Medicine has a total of 6,000 employees and serves more than 10,000 clients across its distributed network.
In addition to patient care, research is a top priority, with more than 1,300 ongoing projects funded by $196 million in external grants and contracts to the UM faculty. The school ranks in the top third among U.S. medical schools in terms of research funding awarded.
The Miller School is committed to providing innovative healthcare to millions of patients, providing 24x7 access to the internal network and the Internet for the information necessary to serve its patients and students. In addition, the School’s information systems are used to facilitate research collaboration. Providing these services requires highly scalable and reliable network identity infrastructure, including domain name system (DNS) and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services.
The University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine IT department’s DNS and DHCP solution previously consisted of Sun servers running Solaris and BIND for DNS services and freeware for dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services—and Windows 2000 servers running BIND for internal domain name resolution (DNS). Upon the departure of their two full-time UNIX expert staff members from the IT staff, the remaining team members found it an overwhelming challenge to manage the previously deployed ad-hoc solution that often required time-intensive patching and upgrades.
Further, the staff found the legacy infrastructure unreliable and deficient for the 24/7 availability required to effectively operate the medical center network. And, the team expressed concern about the security vulnerabilities inherent in its general-purpose server approaches.
As a result, the UM IT team set out to find a replacement for its previous solution, establishing the following criteria for the new infrastructure:
University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine selected and deployed 4 Infoblox appliances, which are purpose-built devices designed to provide the foundation for Identity-Driven Networks (IDNs). The Infoblox appliances deliver next-generation network identity services in a secure and easy-tomanage form factor, and run the DNSone package which provides highly reliable, integrated DNS and DHCP services.
Given the limited IT resources available to manage the network for the entire school of medicine, the appliance-based Infoblox solution, which enables simple deployment, management and onebutton upgrades, was a clear choice for the IT department staff.
Two devices are deployed in a fault-tolerant configuration to ensure resiliency and nonstop delivery of external DNS services. One serves as an authoritative device and the other as a back-up so that in the unlikely event of a device failure, availability of external DNS services is maintained 24x7.
The other two also are deployed in a fault-tolerant configuration to deliver internal IP address assignment services via DHCP for the entire network, including the new network used by more than 7,000 UM physicians and staff members.
Infoblox appliances are designed to provide the foundation for next-generation network identity services. The hardened appliance design and intuitive GUI enable the offloading of network identity services, such as DNS, DHCP and RADIUS, from general-purpose servers that lack reliability and scalability, require significant management overhead for patching and upgrading, and often introduce security vulnerabilities. Instead, these services can be easily managed by a purpose-built, hardened appliance that is inherently secure, reliable and scalable, freeing network administration resources and providing increased security. Additionally, the Infoblox appliances can be deployed standalone or in high-availability pairs to ensure nonstop operation, and can be optionally linked into robust, distributed ID grids for unparalleled network identity infrastructure availability and management benefits.
Because it eliminates the need to install and manage an operating system and various open source applications, the purpose-built, appliance-based Infoblox solution is easy to deploy and simple to upgrade. Additionally, the Infoblox approach increases reliability and has inherent security benefits.
With its integrated DNS/DHCP and fault-tolerance features, the Infoblox solution eliminates single points of failure for the critical DHCP network services that are required to maintain network availability overall, especially for the critical network used by UM’s physicians and staff.
Frank Rodriguez, network and information security manager at the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, commented, “Because there is no server to manage or underlying operating system to maintain, the Infoblox appliances allowed us to reduce the resources we spent on delivering DHCP and DNS services, while increasing overall reliability.”
Leading Academic Medical Center in Florida
External DNS and internal DHCP
Needed simplified administration and increased reliability
4 Infoblox appliances running the DNSone® package for:
