HealthMEDX also evaluated HP Networking switches when undertaking the upgrade. HP is HealthMEDX's vendor.

The Brocade system came in 35% to 40% lower in price than the Cisco bid, Bingham says, and the company expects a return on investment in 14 months. HealthMEDX has been using Brocade SANs since 2009 and the company says it completed the network transition in less than six hours without any downtime or disruption to users.

"From a financial standpoint, it was one of the best decisions we ever made," Bingham says.

HealthMEDX had a number of backup activities that occurred in parallel over the network and those jobs were failing, Bingham says. Switch ports would produce thousands of port errors -- an uplink port with 3,000+ receive errors, and 700 or 800 discard errors per port channel group.

"We were basically running into situations where the network lag or latency was so high that backup jobs were failing," Bingham says. "We have literally zero port errors after making this change. Overnight we went from thousands of receive errors and transmit errors to zero. One night, we're done."