Suva, the Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund, provides insurance to half of Switzerland’s employees and promotes public safety throughout the country. Based in Lucerne, Suva employs more than 4,200 people across 17 agencies and two rehab facilities. Suva covers 130,000 companies, insures more than 2 million full-time workers, and handles nearly 480,000 claims each year.
To improve its service offerings and the customer experience, Suva decided to update its data infrastructure. Digitizing its architecture would allow Suva to automate manual processes, roll out new applications and IT services, and expedite customer claims to enhance customer service. Specifically, Suva wanted to develop its smartCare program, which expands collaborative ecosystems and taps machine learning to automate decision-making.
To support these applications and demanding data requirements, Suva needed a high-performance, flexible, scalable data storage platform. With partner In&Out AG, the company evaluated storage solutions from five different vendors. Hitachi Vantara rose to the top, based on capability, performance, and price.
A Need for Speed
Suva installed two Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5500 solutions as primary storage and Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) 4060 cluster systems for file access. Backups are handled by Hitachi Vantara VSP G600, and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and HCP S Series support long-term data archiving. To further modernize the network, the team deployed Brocade X6-8 Director switches, which doubled the SAN speed to 32 Gbps and boosted storage performance overall.
The Hitachi Vantara VSPs 5500s are configured as a cluster across two sites and can scale as needed. The NVMe data platform stores up to 2PB of business data, and Hitachi Global-Active Device provides data mirroring to ensure reliability. Load balancing capabilities optimize performance. Through deduplication and compression, the platform has improved storage capacity by about 12% more than anticipated.
The Hitachi Vantara VSP platform deftly handles Suva’s wide-ranging workloads, including 200 physical servers with VMware vSphere and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which drive 1,400 virtual servers and another 1,450 virtual desktops. The platform supports core insurance applications, along with SAP customer relationship management and SAP enterprise resource planning systems that tie into Oracle, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases.
VSP 5500 Exceeds Expectations
The Hitachi Vantara VSP 5500 allows Suva to ensure fast, reliable service for its customers that can scale as needed. It enables virtual workspaces and supports innovative application development, so the development team can work collaboratively to build new services and enhance customer features.
Automation and faster processing have led to greater insights, better decision-making, and improved operations. Once installed, Suva found the VSP 5500 exceeded expectations for speed, latency, and throughput. For example, the high-performance solution delivers throughput greater than 10 million IOPS, and storage capacity is 12% better than projected. Business users have noticed shorter batch run times and faster analytics. Optimized database and application performance boosts productivity and enables data-driven business decisions. The enhanced system has maximized capacity and reduced costs.
With a 30-year relationship, Suva trusted Hitachi Vantara to provide excellent support, even while migrating mission-critical data to the new storage solution in a remote work environment. The collaborative team ensured the transition went smoothly. The Hitachi VSP 5500 provides a high-performance, innovative solution today with an easy growth path for the future.
Find out more about Hitachi Vantara’s data storage and hybrid cloud offerings.
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Read the complete Suva customer story at Hitachi Vantara.