Norwich Union shifts critical data

Norwich Union has awarded a four-year contract to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) to move business critical data to a new primary datacentre in Norwich.

According to the Aviva subsidiary's operational technical authority Roly Goram, the move will involve a petabyte of data.

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He said of the new datacentre: "95 per cent of our technology is going to be there."

The deal with HDS will reduce the storage overhead, in terms of space for hardware, by making more efficient use of the storage capacity available.

Goram told silicon.com: "We were only able to use 85 per cent of our legacy system's capacity."

Hitachi has installed a virtualised storage platform at the site, reducing the hardware estate by over 10 to one.

The data migration will take place with the system still live because the information it stores is critical to Norwich Union's ability to do business.

Goram said: "Data is our lifeblood. It's all we have to do our business. We are a 365, 24/7 operation, so shutting down for any period of time was not an option."

Norwich Union refused to go into detail about the level of investment but Goram confirmed he expected to make a saving on current storage costs.

"We've moved to a utility model of pricing. A vendor telling us we don't have to buy more storage than we already have is really refreshing," Goram noted.

With the hardware installed, the data migration will commence shortly, however Norwich Union would not say exactly when or how long the process will take.