Case Study: Overlake Medical Center achieves reliable 24/7 access to critical applications with F5 Networks

Easy, Reliable Access to Critical Applications Lets Hospital Caregivers Focus on Patient Care

Overlake Medical Center, a full-service acute care hospital with about 1,800 employees and more than 1,000 physicians, needed a more reliable, easy-to-manage traffic management solution to support its move to the EpicCare EMR and VMware Horizon View. The small IT team was frustrated by Cisco ACE’s lack of GUI and unpredictable removal of servers from pools, which risked outages that could impact patient care. To address this, Overlake deployed an F5 Networks solution, initially using BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and piloting BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) for secure remote and single sign-on access.

F5 Networks’ BIG-IP LTM provided high availability and stable performance for EpicCare, Exchange Server 2010, VMware Horizon View and other critical apps, supporting about 1,600 virtual desktop users and enabling routine maintenance and upgrades without downtime. The hospital’s IT efficiency improved through F5 tools like iApps and iRules—migration tasks that were slow on Cisco ACE took minutes—and BIG-IP APM adds SAML-based SSO for future SaaS expansion. The result is a more resilient, always-available application environment that helps avoid outages and keeps clinicians focused on patient care.

Overlake Medical Center

Howard Binner

Director of IS Technology and Information Security