Grow With The Flow
by Betsy Ziobron and Janet Crook

Downtime is no option when health facilities depend on receipt of critical medical supplies

When Medline Industries’ sales reached $1.2 billion in 2001, this large privately held U.S. medical supply manufacturer and distributor found that the resulting increased staff and space caused a costly, inconvenient situation. With nearly 200 Medline employees working in off-site leased space, a new 450,000 square foot building at the company’s headquarters in Mundelein, IL was essential.
The main objective for the data communications system was longevity and the ability to jump technology another step up without redoing our cabling infrastructure,” says Scott Gravelle, Medline’s Network Manager. “We’re growing so fast that we would have had to justify not investing in a Category 6 solution and a redundant Gigabit fiber backbone.”
Medline connected its new and existing buildings with an advanced redundant fiber backbone. Network Engineer Brian Dantzig designed the backbone with one fiber path running four feet underground from the main crossconnect (MC) in the existing building to the basement of the new facility. Another runs through the ceiling of the footbridge that connects the two buildings. Each of the new building’s eight intermediate crossconnects (ICs) join the system via 12 strands of multimode and 12 strands of singlemode fiber.
“Redundancy is important to Medline’s business,” says Dantzig. “Downtime costs money and could affect the flow of critical medical supplies to health facilities across the country.” In the new building, four Alpine 3800 series switches from Extreme Networks use a redundancy protocol with a fiber feed back to the main switches. All fiber in the MC and ICs terminates via Hubbell Premise Wiring’s Optichannel rack mount fiber panels.
To determine which company had the expertise to cable the system, Medline system engineers conducted on-site visits to evaluate quality of work. In the end, Illinois-based NU-Line Technologies edged out the competition, and also received the high voltage contract. Medline then reviewed three cabling solutions and network switches, with the Extreme Switches and Hubbell-Mohawk/CDT SureBIT solution proving to be the best option.
For the horizontal cabling, Medline chose the Sure BIT Category 6 solution, a combination of jacks, patch panels, and patch cords from Hubbell Premise Wiring and Category 6 cable from Mohawk/CDT. Under its 25-year Mission Critical Plus warranty, the SureBIT system will provide guaranteed PSACR (Power Sum Attenuation-to-Crosstalk Ratio) headroom, which ensures optimal system performance and assists in limiting the BER (Bit Error Rate) that can cause costly retransmissions and downtime. In each of the ICs, cable is terminated via Hubbell’s NEXTSPEED patch cords and patch panels, and managed with Hubbell’s NEXTFRAME cable management system.
At each of the 400 employee workstations and connections throughout the building, cable is terminated onto Hubbell Category 6 Xcelerator jacks. Hubbell’s fire-rated poke-throughs are installed in the floors of the conference rooms and training center to provide easy-access connections.
Throughout the six-month project, the cabling team faced several challenges. During the second month of cabling, the basement flooded due to a five-inch overnight rainfall in conjunction with temporary sump pumps and a power outage, damaging cables in the basement of the new building. In addition, several moves, adds and changes (MACs), such as workstation relocation, wall rearranging and the shifting of cubicle clusters to offices, caused changes in the style of faceplates and other products. Despite these challenges, the employees moved into the new building on schedule. The final project budget was approximately $500,000, including MACs.
Medline’s new cabling infrastructure has performed well with no incidents or down time. “Our infrastructure can handle much higher speeds, even if the technology does not yet exist to push it,” says Gravelle. “This cabling will take us at least another 15 years into the future. The redundant fiber backbone and SureBIT solution has provided us with a reliable, error-free infrastructure that is essential for delivering medical supplies directly to hospitals across the nation.”
Medline recently broke ground for a specialized manufacturing facility and began installing wireless inventory systems to scan barcodes on incoming and outgoing products at more than 20 warehouses across the nation. “We’ve outgrown the small, outdated metal cabling-switch cabinets we were using in the warehouses, “ says Gravelle. “We’ve adopted Hubbell’s low-profile ReBox cabinet as our new company standard. We’ve successfully installed these at new facilities in Michigan, Missouri, Maryland, and California.” The rugged wall-mount cabinet is designed for use in uncontrolled environments. Medline seems to have found the right cure for its current and future cabling and cabinet needs.

Betsy Ziobron is a freelance writer for the cabling industry.
Janet Crook is with Hubbell Premise Wiring Marketing Communications.
Reprinted with revisions to format, from the September 2002 issue of Communications News.
© 2002 by Nelson Publishing Inc.