ITWire

Under the deal, MHS worked with HP premier partner, Triforce Australia, to deploy VirtualSystem, as part of an HP Converged Infrastructure architecture in a new data centre, to deliver efficient, cost-effective healthcare services to a growing number of customers.

After being acquired by Medibank Private, MHS experienced rapid growth, resulting in a five-fold increase in staff and greater demand for its services, but the company’s existing IT infrastructure was unable to meet performance and availability requirements associated with the upswing in demand.

"Our business was growing at such speed that our infrastructure quickly met its limitations, resulting in capacity and performance issues," said Charles Gonzalez, head of MHS’ Infrastructure Services.

"The flexibility, scalability and ease of management provided by our HP Converged Infrastructure allow us to keep pace with our business growth."

HP’s general manager, Storage, HP South Pacific, Steve Kelly, said that by pre-integrating HP 3PAR Storage, BladeSystem servers and Virtual Connect technology, the solution enabled MHS to allocate resources easily across physical and virtual environments to ensure predictable delivery and service levels.

“As a result, MHS can rapidly provision storage based on changing network workloads while quickly delivering new services customers need.”

According to Kelly, organizations providing pivotal healthcare services need a “technology infrastructure that can simultaneously support diverse system users and various types of workloads.

"The HP Converged Infrastructure enables Medibank Health Solutions to provide scalable solutions that support growth while ensuring continuous operation of its daily business."

Kelly said the HP VirtualSystem solution enables MHS to:

•    Reduce storage capacity requirements by 80 percent with HP 3PAR Thin Conversion migration from MHS' legacy storage solution, achieving a greater return on investment by reducing management and overhead costs

•    Improve productivity with 99.999 percent uptime, providing 2,500 employees, the remote workforce and customers reliable access to healthcare services and programs

•    Ensure rapid disaster recovery by installing one of the HP 3PAR T400 Storage systems at a separate location, and including HP 3PAR Remote Copy Software on both systems to share data from any application simply, efficiently and affordably

•    Perform quick, proactive maintenance of IT systems to ensure consistent network uptime and 24/7 service supporting more than 3 million healthcare interactions a year