Customer Success Story
Fresh Hope Communities raises the bar for quality residential care
Fresh Hope Communities has provided exceptional support and lifestyle choices for Australians seeking retirement, residential, and respite care for nearly a century. Founded by the churches of Christ in New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, the faith-based organization is focused on supporting the ageing population through these services, plus supporting school and community groups through their outdoor experiences and group accommodation offerings.
Australia faces a deepening housing crisis that is distressing its most vulnerable citizens. Finding affordable housing is difficult, especially for the elderly, frontline workers, and other low- to middle-income individuals and families; and those requiring crisis and transitional housing; and older women on low income. Fresh Hope Communities is making a positive contribution with 11 residential care and retirement community locations as well as a brand new affordable housing development coming soon.
With a combination of new and old buildings, Fresh Hope Communities transitioned to in-house network support to better meet the care and communication needs of its residents, their families, guests, and staff.
Time saved
To travel and troubleshoot after power was restored to a site. Fresh Hope changed the recovery switch configuration based on Juniper JTAC’s recommendation and also upgraded their skills.
9
ICT staff including support, network and systems administrators, and business systems
99%
Of outages to date were related to a loss of external power longer than the UPS can keep the network up in the event of power loss (as of June 2023)
18
16 residential care locations and 2 outdoor adventure and conferencing and group accommodations
Network outages frustrate IT, staff, and residents
After years of outsourcing its network services, Fresh Hope Communities changed direction and brought network management in-house.
“We believed we could get more out of the network and eliminate downtime by using our internal support team,” says Glen Hegner, CIO at Fresh Hope Communities.
Multiple locations were experiencing outages due to network misconfigurations. Staff and residents were frustrated with the downtime and complained to management regularly. During bad weather, network reliability problems intensified.
“We get a lot of thunderstorms, high winds, and lightning that caused local power outages. The switches would go down and not come back online,” says Hegner.
Getting the network up and running took way too long. Staff could spend as much as one day a week solving network problems as technicians faced long drives out to Fresh Hope Communities’ locations to troubleshoot on site.
Connect family and residents during critical times
Juniper EX Series Switches provide the core and access networks at Fresh Hope Communities’ 18 residential aged care, retirement, outdoor education and conference accommodations, and office locations.
Whether it’s keeping families in touch, providing top-notch residential care, or giving children and community groups the opportunity to explore the outdoors, the Juniper network provides fast, reliable connectivity. The network supports building management systems and physical security systems, as well as the desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks used for clinical care and residents’ personal devices.
“We are fully reliant on the new Juniper backbone, and it was critical during Covid when our residents were connecting with friends and family over Zoom,” says Hegner. “We want to continue to have that connection available and expand our family-centric services for residents.”
Set-it-and-forget-it networking
Hegner was initially concerned that bringing network management in-house would overtax his already busy—and small—team. His fears were quickly put to rest. Between the ease of configuration, the flexible Junos® OS, and the ready support from the Juniper Technical Assistance Center (JTAC), the transition has been seamless.
“Our staff loves Junos and working with the experts at JTAC. We have no regrets about bringing support and management in-house,” he says.
The biggest benefit has been the time that engineers are saving.
“We were wasting a day a week, with technicians trying to resolve our problems,” says Hegner. “We are no longer losing time looking for network faults or fixing issues, and it’s a big savings for us.”
With what Hegner describes as a “set-it-and-forget-it network,” the IT department can focus on day-to-day business.
The Products
EX2300
The EX2300 Ethernet Switch delivers a compact, high-density, cost-effective solution for small network environments where space and power are at a premium.
EX4600
The EX4600 Ethernet Switch offers a compact, highly scalable, high-performance 10GbE solution for enterprise campus distribution deployments as well as low-density data center top-of-rack environments.
Published July 2023