Medibank division replaces storage and servers

Medibank Health Solutions (MHS) has overhauled its underperforning legacy infrastructure, opting to remain a HP customer in the process.

The private health insurer, which provides a range of telephone- and web-based healthcare services, has upgraded from legacy HP equipment to the vendor's converged infrastructure solution in a bid to better manage data growth.

Charles Gonzalez, head of infrastructure services at Medibank Health Solutions said MHS had experienced a sharp upswing in customers, matched by a shift in the types of data being stored about them. 

New compliance requirements meant that medical data, health industry guidelines such as new dispositions and medical alerts, and voice telephony now have to be stored.

"We have multiple clients both state and federal which require us to record all calls," he said. "We have a contractual obligation to record 100 percent of calls that come to our line of business. That type of data is classified as gold application and is key for us."

"We [also] do our own development in house and the level of information that goes into our applications and databases has grown," Gonzalez explained.

Described as a "big piece" of a wider systems upgrade, MHS purchased two 3PAR T400 Storage systems and HP BladeSystem servers, linked up via HP's Virtual Connect.

The healthcare provider's previous system - based on HP's EVA4400 storage array - had struggled with capacity and performance issues. Gonzalez said the previous solution was replaced before any danger of system outages.

"We could have looked at a new EVA shelf with a higher capacity, but that wasn't the driver," Gonzalez told iTnews. "We take to take a true enterprise step that [fell] in line with our business strategy as well."

MHS will configure one of the two 3PAR storage arrays at a separate location to ensure rapid disaster recovery.

"Our DR environment has received a complete refresh," Gonzalez said. "And we've started using the HP 3PAR for seamless replication."

Gonzalez said he expected the new solution to hold Medibank in good stead for at least four to five years.