Building one healthy network.

The challenge.

Vivantes, the largest municipal health network in Germany, strives to provide high quality medical and nursing care for the inhabitants of Berlin at every stage of their lives: from the moment they draw their first breath to the moment they breathe their last. One out of every three Berlin babies is born at a Vivantes facility, and more than half a million people, or one third of all Berlin’s patients, seek assistance from the vast range of Vivantes clinics and institutes every year.

Vivantes doesn’t see itself as solely caring for the sick, but as an integral presence in the complete cycle of life of Berlin’s population, both as a service provider and employer. Almost 15,000 people are employed by Vivantes at over 90 different locations in Berlin. Vivantes facilities include 9 hospitals, 13 specialized clinics, 16 nursing homes, 45 outpatient practitioners, rehabilitation clinics and hospices, as well as catering, hygiene and housekeeping subsidiaries.

First-class patient care is the leading priority for Vivantes, but to ensure top quality medical services, an organization requires a top quality administrative and IT net- work infrastructure. In an increasingly interconnected world, IP address management forms the cornerstone of an effective IT network infrastructure. Conflicts in IP address management, lack of auditing and monitoring options, inadequate access control and limited synchronization capability can easily slow down, disrupt or even destabilize a whole IT network. Simply put, an unhealthy IT network infrastructure can affect the operational health of any organization, more so one providing critical care to people in various stages of need.

As the IP networking backbone of a health organization that strives not only to cure patients, but to prevent illness in general, the Vivantes IT Systems Network Management Team didn’t wait for their network to show any signs of ill health before they started searching for a comprehensive and efficient IP Address Management solution. With several offers on the table, the Vivantes team opted for the flexible Micetro by Men&Mice.

Overlay as a treatment.

A key reason for their choice was the ability of Micetro to cater for and adapt to the individual requirements of the Vivantes IT network. The company was already in possession of a strong DNS and DHCP infrastructure in distributed locations, but needed to have a global, unified view and secure control of their complex environment.

Micetro by Men&Mice, a sophisticated overlay solution consisting of individually integrated DNS, DHCP and IPAM modules, is easily deployed on top of existing infrastructure, with little to none operational or network disruption.

It was the fact that their known infrastructure could remain intact that convinced Vivantes of Micetro as their remedy of choice.

Consistent customer care, from top to bottom.

Before the introduction of Micetro at Vivantes, the Networking Team struggled to update records and tables, monitor subnets and scopes and fully integrate with Active Directory sites and subnets. Manually checking for free IP addresses was very time-consuming.

Paul says that his team had no problems with the adjustment to Micetro. It’s a simple, stable and low-maintenance solution. “That’s also very important to us because we don’t want to spend a lot of time managing the tools. We just want to use the tools and not be caught up in the administration of the administration of administration.”

Since implementing the solution, the technical support, as well as the quick feedback and good help from the Men&Mice Services Team, have ensured a very positive experience with Men&Mice, according to Rainer Paul.

Over time, the combination of efficient DHCP management and fine-grained access control contained in Micetro have become more important to Paul and his team. “That matters a lot because there are different ranges on all the DHCP servers and with Micetro, you don’t have to know which DHCP server owns which range. You can go into the range and configure the reservation. You don’t have to give everyone access to all the DHCP management server consoles, only to Micetro, and allow them to do reservations, for example, so there is no need to search which DHCP server is responsible for which scope.”

Ensuring a stable, healthy network.

In the particularly sensitive environment of health management, itis essential for companies such as Vivantes to protect the health of their infrastructure and operations through a stable, controlled and easy-to-maintain IP network.

“With the help of Micetro, we have mastered this challenge and now have a healthy IP network in front of us,” confirms Rainer Paul.