Kiwibank virtualises storage with Hitachi

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 07 July 2011 12:07

IT Industry - Deals

New Zealand's Kiwibank has selected Hitachi Data Systems as a storage supplier.

Kiwibank is using Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) products to consolidate its storage.

"Kiwibank is one of the fastest growing banks in New Zealand four years running and a by-product of this growth has meant that we had previously rolled out lower tiered SANs to meet aggressive business critical delivery dates," says Ron van de Riet, the banks's general manager of IT and business.

"However, having disparate SANs meant that our systems were not being used to their full capacity, leading to numerous cost inefficiencies and outages associated with transferring data between the systems. By deploying the Hitachi USP [Universal Storage Manager] VM, we've been able to move to a storage virtualisation approach, eliminating any disruption to both the business and our customers," he added.

Kiwibank has installed an HDS AMS 2500 storage system managed with a HDS USP. There are also plans to use the HDS Virtual Storage Platform [VSP] to store data from core banking systems.

"With financial institutions operating in an increasingly regulated environment, competition intensifying and customer expectations at an all-time high, having a reliable and scalable infrastructure to manage information is paramount," said Neville Vincent, vice president and general manager, HDS Australia and New Zealand.

"Our comprehensive portfolio of solutions assist financial services organisations such as Kiwibank to improve compliance and business continuity, better manage its mission-critical systems and more effectively utilise its existing assets," he added.