Norwich Union closes Hitachi storage deal

Four-year agreement will support datacentre move

The datacentre move is one of the key priorities for IT project delivery at Norwich Union

Insurance group Norwich Union has closed a storage deal with Hitachi Data Systems to support the migration of one of its main datacentres to a new site.

The four-year deal replaces a previous multi-vendor storage arrangement, and is aimed at driving IT efficiencies and simplifying the firm's infrastructure.

"We had high expectations from the start. We wanted the simplicity of a single supplier relationship but the cost benefits of a dual supplier relationship," said Roly Goram, operational technical authority at Norwich Union IT Operations.

"As the migration progresses, the operational cost efficiencies and performance gains will become ever more apparent. Capacity and utilisation levels will increase, and our overall storage infrastructure will become much easier to manage."

The new storage systems have already been installed in the new datacentre. After the migration of data, Norwich Union will be able to manage the storage environment of the server facilities from a single interface, which is intended to reduce costs and time.

As part of Norwich Union's efforts to modernise its back-office set-up and streamline operations, the company consolidated 2,500 ageing servers to fewer than 200 physical boxes running 1,000 virtual machines earlier this year.

During this project, which was successfully rolled out in six weeks, the insurer had to deal with issues encountered with software drivers and old networking infrastructure that slowed down the deployment.

"Keeping software up to date across the server infrastructure had become a complex and time-consuming task," Steve Houghton, infrastructure solution architect at Norwich Union IT Solutions, said at the time.

The datacentre move is one of the key priorities for IT project delivery at Norwich Union, and is forecast to complete by mid-2009.