Four-Year UK Storage Contract With Norwich Union for HDS

Hitachi Data Systems announced that it has been awarded a four-year UK storage deal from Norwich Union, the international savings, investments and insurance group. The contract initially focuses on the migration of one of Norwich Union’s mission-critical UK data centres to a new site and supports a strategic focus to simplify Norwich Union’s IT infrastructure and drive IT efficiencies.

Norwich Union is part of Aviva – the world’s fifth largest insurance group with 45 million customers worldwide. The business is underpinned by UK data centres which run many essential operational and customer-facing applications. Consequently, Norwich Union was looking for a storage partner that could handle the major data centre migration with no loss of service, performance or availability. Norwich Union was also challenged with managing a multi-vendor storage estate, dramatic year-on-year data growth driven by both compliance requirements and unstructured data, and a tightening IT budget.

The Hitachi solution – to complete the data centre migration via a total storage refresh at a new site – is already underway. Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V arrays and Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 systems have been installed in the new data centre, and migration of the data is imminent. Hitachi and Norwich Union have agreed an aggressive timetable for the entire data migration. Data will be virtualised across the UK data centres including the new site, thereby acting as a single logical data centre and sharing a sophisticated, multi-tiered structure. With the Hitachi Universal Storage Platform in place, Norwich Union will be able to manage the storage environment of the data centres from a single management interface, saving on management costs and time. Norwich Union will take advantage of a whole range of Hitachi software to ensure optimal configuration and management of the virtualised storage estate.

“We had high expectations from the start – we wanted the simplicity of a single supplier relationship but the cost benefits of a dual supplier relationship” said Roly Goram, Operational Technical Authority, Norwich Union IT Operations. “The solution put forward by Hitachi tackled all of our concerns head on, from the technology right through to the cost model. As the migration progresses, the operational cost efficiencies and performance gains will become ever more apparent. Capacity and utilisation levels will increase, and our overall storage infrastructure will become much easier to manage.”

“Norwich Union is a great example of Hitachi’s ‘storage economics’ in action” said Steve Murphy, UK managing director, Hitachi Data System. “By considering a whole range of storage metrics over the next four years and then further enhancing its tiered and virtualised storage solution, Norwich Union is creating a much more efficient infrastructure and making genuine operational savings.”