MD Anderson is an extension of the University of Texas located in Houston, TX. It is both a degree-granting academic institution and the world’s leading comprehensive cancer treatment and research center. With faculty and staff working in more than 25 buildings in Houston and many locations around Texas, MD Anderson is one of the largest cancer centers in the world.

Already a VMware customer, MD Anderson began working with VMware networking solutions in 2019. At that time, they had multiple branches connected with commodity broadband and inflexible legacy Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Turning up a new site was a lengthy and time-consuming process. Many sites struggled with poor application performance, particularly when using traditional virtual private network (VPN) connectivity over broadband.

Radiology was also an important driver for better connectivity. Radiology image files, for example CT scans and MRI images, are large and must be transmitted accurately and quickly—one glitch and the entire image has to be re-transmitted. With no application awareness or per-application quality of service (QoS), radiologists could not keep up with analyzing bandwidth-intensive image files in a timely manner—a key metric of their day-to-day job performance.

MD Anderson needed a better solution and decided that software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) was the most promising technology to fix its issues.