Hawaii Medical Service Association Installs Infinidat InfiniBox

Infinidat, Ltd, a provider of enterprise storage solutions, announced that independent health insurer, Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), has selected the InfiniBox enterprise storage array to improve its customer experience by better managing the sheer volume growth of its data, consolidating its storage infrastructure, and boosting application response times.

Since installing InfiniBox in both its Kapolei and Honolulu data centers, HMSA has improved its overall storage performance by more than 40%.

More than half of Hawaii’s population counts on HMSA for reliable and affordable health plans. Therefore, technology solutions that are performant, dependable and cost-effective are essential for meeting the expectations of the insurer and its members.

“With InfiniBox, we’re obtaining the high performance and exceptional reliability we need to meet our technology goals,” said Michel Danon, SVP and CIO, HMSA. “At the same time, we’re getting the best overall storage pricing and exceeding our cost objectives.“

HMSA also chose InfiniBox for its ability to support the organization’s new data center model. HMSA had been using one of its data centers as the main production data center. The other was used for DR. By installing the InfiniBox system, HMSA is able to ensure faster, more reliable data recovery in both locations. This means both data centers are active production centers and can provide DR.

“With our previous storage system, the replication time for 80GB of VMs was anywhere from 55 to 90 minutes. With the InfiniBox systems, we reduced the replication time to only sixs,” explained Danon.

During Proof of Concept testing with the InfiniBox, HMSA recorded before and after metrics and was astounded at what else they found.

“InfiniBox was subjected to the most rigorous testing we’ve ever conducted on a storage platform, about three times more testing than our previous system,” explained Joe McVicker, senior storage administrator, HMSA. “We were seeing lower write latency than the all-flash array we use for our VDI. That is very impressive for a hybrid array. For me, that’s paramount. Whatever we put on the InfiniBox, I know that write latency is pretty much non-existent.“

HMSA has migrated most of its VMware, Vcloud, private clouds, and user testing areas onto InfiniBox. It is in the process of migrating most of its production workloads and plans to build out infrastructure that will also go onto the InfiniBox.

“We’re shuffling most of our application data sets onto the InfiniBox architecture,” explained McVicker. “Confidence is really, really high when it comes to deciding ‘where do we put it?’. We don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s going on the InfiniBox, plain and simple.“

Scalable to over 2.7PB of usable storage capacity in a single 19-inch/42U rack, InfiniBox offers 99.99999% availability, microsecond latency and delivers performance of up to one million IO/s. Reliability features include end-to-end data protection; triple redundant power and data paths; snapshots and replication; and hot swap upgrades. InfiniBox storage arrays are also power-efficient, drawing a maximum of between 3-8KW at a full load. As a result of all its storage performance and efficiency capabilities, InfiniBox provides customers with a low TCO.