Medical Equipment Distributor Gulf Medical Replaces Cumulus With Pica8

 

Pica8 and Gulf Medical logos

Gulf Medical is a medical equipment and solutions distributor, headquartered in Saudi Arabia. https://www.gulfmedical.com/

Gulf Medical previously used Cumulus Linux for PoE access switches at hospital and clinic customer sites, but over time developed some issues with the Cumulus access switch quality. Additionally, the NVIDIA acquisition of Cumulus made future support outlook uncertain. Gulf Medical took this opportunity to evaluate other vendors for upgrades.

“We wanted to stay supported on Broadcom, and fix interoperability issues with video phones,” said Mokhtar Attiya, Information Technology Manager at Gulf Medical. “Sometimes the phones were starting unexpectedly.”

Gulf Medical began upgrading Cumulus Linux with Pica8 PicOS Software Switches on Edgecore PoE switches in a hospital site with five floors and 4 switches per floor. The switches needed to support Medical IT with the Healthcare Information System (HIS) whereby every floor has a medical device that sends notifications including Artificial Intelligence (AI). The system works with Medtronic to install all devices with Medtronic and HL7 with medical device access. All of these devices are moving to PicOS.

free-hospital-clipart-group-hospital-building-clip-art-office-building-person-human-truck-transparent-png-194244Gulf Medical provides the Pica8 PicOS software switching solution as a managed service to the the hospitals and clinics. PicOS switches connect to Cisco video phones, Meraki cameras, Cisco access points and IoT devices that send info into collection. They are currently implementing Network Access Control from Open Source product PacketFence for identity management and port security.

“In the future, Gulf Medical plans to integrate with Pica8’s AmpCon Network Controller for push-button automation and zero touch provisioning,” said Attiya. “We plan to leverage Pica8’s Ansible Playbooks to customize automation.”

Gulf Medical is also using Pica8 software with SilverPeak SD-WAN.