Swiss Insurer Helsana Enjoys a Significant Performance Boost with Huawei Storage

Introducing Helsana Group

Covering more than 2.1 million insured people, and with a premium volume of CHF 6.7 billion — that's approximately US$7.26 billion — Helsana Group is the leading health and accident insurance firm in Switzerland. Rather than being publicly listed, the company is organized as a holding company instead, with more than 3300 employees working across the country. Helsana provides its customers with individual support through innovative services and offerings — covering basic, supplementary, and accident insurance as well as sick pay — protecting them against the financial consequences of illness, accident, maternity, and senior care. Helsana also offers tailor-made insurance solutions to mitigate the economic consequences of absence due to illnesses or accidents for more than 60,000 companies and associations, covering approximately 700,000 employees.

Milestones

The joint success story of Helsana and Huawei began in 2018, when Huawei replaced Helsana's entire Network-Attached Storage (NAS) system with a Huawei OceanStor storage system, at the time the latest generation of mission-critical storage. The decisive advantage that Huawei OceanStor has is that it enables both file and block functionalities. The entire data migration was carried out by Huawei, with the active support of Helsana's internal Information Technology (IT) team, using Huawei Migration Director, a tool for automated data migration — the first time the tool was used in Switzerland.

Supporting the development of its main applications and services, Helsana upgraded to Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage at the end of 2019: the first deployment of this high-end flash storage system in Western Europe.

Flash forward to 2021 and Helsana has replaced its block production system with two OceanStor Dorado high-end storage systems, powered by Huawei's Data Management Engine (DME), which enables all systems to be managed uniformly from a single platform. Here, too, data migration was carried out by Huawei, closely cooperating with Helsana's team.

Standardizing its infrastructure, Helsana has not only gained a technological edge, but reaped economic benefits as well. Such unified infrastructure is cleaner and leaner, offering comprehensive functionality while slashing acquisition and maintenance costs. In addition, such advanced technology has a reduced physical footprint, saving space, reducing power consumption, and driving down general operating costs.

"We are delighted that Helsana, the largest health insurance company in Switzerland, has chosen Huawei technology. We are confident that our ultra-fast and reliable systems will help Helsana continue to provide world-class services to its customers," said by Haitao Wang, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Huawei Technologies Switzerland AG.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage

Huawei has introduced several innovations in its latest OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage systems, optimizing efficiency and performance in a wide range of data center scenarios. These all-flash storage systems feature high performance chips — developed in-house — from the front-end to the computing layer. The chips incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as memory and Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) chips.

With Huawei SmartMatrix architecture, OceanStor Dorado guarantees the stability and availability of storage system services. For example, the system can tolerate the simultaneous failure of seven out of eight controllers, providing extremely high levels of reliability. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is also dramatically reduced for a variety of data center scenarios, achieving permanent savings in terms of investment, capacity, power, and maintenance costs for customers.

A Solution Recognized by the Industry

Huawei has received widespread international industry recognition for its all-flash storage systems. Indeed, according to global research firm Gartner, Huawei far outperformed all other vendors in the first quarter of 2019, growing by 234% in the storage field. Huawei storage systems — including OceanStor Dorado all-flash systems — even became a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for storage systems in November of that year. And, in 2020, OceanStor Dorado was ranked as one of the most competitive products in the storage sector by Interop, an annual IT conference.

The list goes on. ESG-LAB — an independent, non-governmental association dedicated to environmental, social, and governance objectives — verified Huawei storage systems' performance metrics, including its active-active features, minimized latency, the fault tolerance of its three Solid State Drives (SSDs), and deduplication and compression ratios. The organization DCIG 2020-21 Enterprise All-Flash Array Buyer’s Guide lists Huawei all-flash storage systems in the top five of its high-end storage list. And, according to market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC), in 2020 Huawei rose from fifth place among global storage vendors to third within the span of just one year.