The company began upgrading its storage networking and disaster recovery capabilities last spring.

Early in the project, the Louisville, Ky.-based long-term medical care provider replaced McData Corp. directors and switches with two storage-area networks (SAN), said Tim Hesson, director of storage management.

The new system uses four MDS 9509 Multilayer Director Switches (MDS) from Cisco Systems Inc. and provides 800 ports, he said. The consolidation freed up 100 switch ports that had simply linked all the switches in the McData network, Hesson noted.

Kindred plans to expand its use of the MDS switch's iSCSI capabilities for Ethernet connectivity to eventually consolidate backup on some of its 1,500 Windows-based servers.

"We've always tried to take a look around the corner," Hesson said. "If we are going to spend this money, is there any possibility to do something different or to better improve the infrastructure tomorrow, even if we can't leverage it today?" He didn't disclose a cost for the overall project.