New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Corporation Accelerates Move to Cloud With Hitachi Accelerated Flash

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Delivers Sub-Millisecond Response for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Wellington — July 19, 2016 — Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) today announced that New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has successfully consolidated, virtualized and accelerated its infrastructure with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). The upgrade supports ACC’s strategic move to a tiered storage environment with the ability to dynamically allocate application workloads to Hitachi Accelerated Flash (HAF) and port systems more easily to the cloud.

ACC is a government organization that provides comprehensive, no-fault personal injury cover for all New Zealand residents and visitors. Within the NZ Government’s ‘cloud-first’ framework, ACC is working with a hybrid cloud model with virtualization at the critical infrastructure level. The 4,200+ strong government body is a highly transactional organization that also requires greater performance and speed for the delivery of external and internal applications.

ACC opted to consolidate its storage environment in a single Hitachi platform across its two data centre sites in Auckland and Wellington. The upgrade adds 16 flash module drives (FMD) to support the demand for concurrent, large I/O enterprise workloads including the organization’s virtual desktop infrastructure. Together with Hitachi Dynamic Tiering, the 1.2PB Hitachi system allows ACC to move from one to three storage tiers with full visibility and control over capacity allocation.

As a result, Hitachi Accelerated Flash delivers response times of less than 1 millisecond when employees log on to the virtual portal, even during peak demand in the morning.

“Hitachi Accelerated Flash gave us what we needed and more for the VDI. We now have enough IOPS and SAN to cater for multiple logons from different form factors, supporting between 2000 and 3000 concurrent users. Other applications such as the claim and file system as well as databases have also benefitted from the move to flash in a tiered storage environment,” said Don Montgomery, technology architect at ACC.

With the latest upgrade, ACC also reached a significant milestone for storage virtualization, with levels up from 60% to 95%.

“Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform gave us the visibility and control to further advance our virtualization strategy as we migrate most of our applications to the public cloud. We now have 95% of our infrastructure virtualized as well as 80% to 90% of our server environment,” said Montgomery.

“The Accident Compensation Corporation demonstrates Hitachi Data Systems’ ability to support public service organizations in delivering services through the cloud to users anywhere while meeting stringent requirements for data security and privacy,” said Nathan McGregor, vice president, Australia and New Zealand at Hitachi Data Systems. “Speed, visibility and control are paramount in the age of digital transformation.”

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About Hitachi Data Systems
Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., builds information management and social innovation solutions that help businesses succeed and societies be safer, healthier and smarter. We focus on big data that offers real value – what we call the Internet of Things that matter. Our IT infrastructure, analytics, content and cloud solutions and services drive strategic management and analysis of the world’s data. Only Hitachi Data Systems integrates the best information technology and operational technology from across the Hitachi family of companies to deliver the exceptional insight that business and society need to transform and thrive. Visit us at http://www.hds.com/anz/.

About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, delivers innovations that answer society’s challenges. The company’s consolidated revenues for fiscal 2015 (ended March 31, 2016) totaled 10,034.3 billion yen ($88.7 billion). The Hitachi Group is a global leader in the Social Innovation Business, and it has approximately 335,000 employees worldwide. Through collaborative creation, Hitachi is providing solutions to customers in a broad range of sectors, including Power / Energy, Industry / Distribution / Water, Urban Development, and Finance / Government & Public / Healthcare. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com.

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