Leading Swiss health insurer upgrades its central storage systems

To ensure the best customer care for the future, health insurance provider, CONCORDIA decided to completely renew its central storage systems.

Background

CONCORDIA is one of the largest health insurance providers in Switzerland and the Principality of Liechtenstein. The company responds to the trust of its more than 618,000 basic policyholders with outstanding customer service. In this respect, perfectly functioning IT systems are of critical importance.

The demands on its IT infrastructure are constantly increasing and as a competent service provider that enjoys above-average customer satisfaction, the company feels an obligation to its customers to constantly improve its technological facilities.

Challenges

CONCORDIA decided to completely renew its storage infrastructure as part of a platform lifecycle. Peter Herger, Head of Systems Engineering & Databases at CONCORDIA, explains: “The upgrading of functions would have been too costly on the existing system. Therefore, the most sensible solution was complete renewal.” The company wanted a new storage solution that was designed to guarantee an optimal price/performance ratio and to ensure fail-safe operation across locations. It also needed to offer the capability for modular scalability and integration of file services.

Solution

After a selection process that looked at several providers, CONCORDIA chose the Huawei solution offered by Infoniqa, its new storage partner. “In our presentation we were able to explain the possibilities offered by a high-performance, high availability solution and demonstrate them through a number of positive references from satisfied customers,” comments Thomas Eugster, District Sales Manager at Infoniqa and also Product Manager responsible for the company’s entire Huawei business.

The solution is based on the Huawei OceanStor 5800 storage solution with 300TiB full flash capacity per data center, providing a highly available active/active (HyperMetro) solution. To support CONCORDIA’S long-term business development, it uses new technology to offer powerful performance achieving 300,000 IOPS for fr ontend random read 8KB at each location and 180,000 IOPS for backend random read 8KB at each location employing a mirroring solution. In addition, licenses were allocated for deduplication and compression. CONCORDIA also has the option of activating the integrated file service or expanding capacity in a modular way at any time.

“Huawei’s OceanStor platform has fully met our requirements,” emphasises Peter Herger. “It offers the RAW capacity we need, without impacting performance. What we are particularly impressed by,” Herger continues, “is the full active/active support, which is proving to be the ideal solution for our company’s requirements.”

The Proof of Concept (POC) environment was installed and configured in just a few days. After making some adjustments to optimise performance, which Infoniqa managed in close consultation with the customer and Huawei, the final configuration was installed and handed over to CONCORDIA for data migration.

Benefits

Huawei’s solution has quickly demonstrated many positive measurable effects. The performance of CONCORDIA’s main application Adcubum Syrius has been increased. Failover procedures have been simplified and the average response time in online operations has been reduced by 40 per cent.

Moreover, the operational costs of the new storage solution are demonstrably lower than with its previous systems and CONCORDIA now feels able to meet future requirements with confidence and to guarantee its customers the very best support in the years to come.

Peter Herger sums up: “It’s not only Huawei’s technical solution that convinced us. Nor is it solely the good priceto- performance ratio that was provided to us. It’s the cumulative sum of all factors, including the competent and customer-oriented support provided by Huawei and Infoniqa, that have made the storage renewal project with Huawei an important and positive step for CONCORDIA.”

About Huawei Enterprise Business Group

Huawei Enterprise Business Group (“Huawei Enterprise”) is one of the three business groups of Huawei, a leading global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions provider. Leveraging Huawei’s strong R&D capabilities and comprehensive technical expertise, Huawei Enterprise provides a wide range of highly efficient customer-centric ICT solutions and services to global vertical industry and enterprise customers across government and public sector, finance, transportation, electric power, energy, commercial businesses, and ISPs.

Huawei Enterprise’s innovative and leading solutions cover network infrastructure, Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), cloud computing and data center, enterprise information security, and industry application solutions.

For more information, please visit: e.huawei.com/uk

About CONCORDIA

Founded in 1913 as a health insurance company, CONCORDIA has evolved into an innovative healthcare company and is today one of the largest health insurers in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, with 618,000 basic policyholders and over 200 agencies and offices.

For more information, please visit: concordia.ch

About Infoniqa

Infoniqa is an IT Systems Integrator focused on data center solutions and information management, which introduces and implements established and innovative solutions in the Swiss market.

Existing customers include global corporations as well as dynamic medium-sized companies and institutions.

For more information, please visit: infoniqa.ch