New Zealand’s vBridge Selects HP Converged Storage

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New Zealand’s vBridge Selects HP Converged Storage for 100 Percent Uptime
IT infrastructure provider increases data centre capacity, efficiency to support growing customer demand
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AUCKLAND, New Zealand, Sept. 6, 2012 — HP today announced that vBridge, a New Zealand-based IT infrastructure service provider, has selected HP Converged Storage to cost-effectively support the increased capacity demands of its hosted infrastructure services.

Following the massive 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, vBridge experienced a 1,100 percent increase in demand for its virtualised infrastructure services. This rapid growth required vBridge to upgrade its data centre.

vBridge seamlessly expanded its HP Converged Infrastructure with a significant investment in HP Converged Storage, a product portfolio built from the ground up to meet the needs of today’s data centres by offering industry-leading storage technologies.

vBridge chose to deploy 25 HP LeftHand Storage nodes and have had no customer downtime in a city that has experienced approximately 10,000 earthquakes since the company’s 2010 inception.

The affordability, functionality and performance of HP LeftHand Storage has enabled vBridge to meet unforeseen surges in demand without increasing overhead or cost to clients. As a result, the company has maintained and enhanced its competitive advantage with a pricing model that is significantly lower than its competitors.

“To gain a competitive advantage in a region that offers companies one of the world’s largest selections of public cloud service providers, launching vBridge required a data centre that was affordable and met the performance expectations of clients with intensive data-management requirements,” said Hamish Roy, director, vBridge. “In addition to being 75 percent more cost-effective than competitive solutions, HP LeftHand Storage provided the scale we needed to keep pace with rapid growth, as well as the reliability of around-the-clock data protection, which is critical to our clients.”

HP LeftHand Storage offers enterprise-class application availability and disaster-recovery features for automated failover or failback without the complexity or cost. Optimised for virtualised environments, it provides continuous data and application availability to meet changing demands in real time.

Upon adding new HP LeftHand Storage systems, which are easily installed in 30 minutes, vBridge achieved near-immediate return on investment (ROI). The systems’ modular design lowers energy and data centre footprint costs compared to traditional storage area network (SAN) solutions, which require other supporting infrastructure to maintain.

HP Peer Motion storage federation enables vBridge to quickly move, redistribute or balance data workloads among its HP LeftHand Storage clusters at the master-data-centre level without business disruption. This greatly simplifies data centre management and maximises capacity utilisation, while eliminating the need to manage individual storage devices at disparate locations. As a result, vBridge executives can easily reallocate administrative resources to customise solutions for clients and grow its business. Transparently shifting data to systems with available capacity through federated thin provisioning also reduces the need for future storage purchases.

By enabling companies to move their on-premise data to a virtualised environment, vBridge estimates it has mitigated its customers’ business continuity risk by as much as 85 percent.

“In the competitive cloud computing market, managed service providers must offer storage services that boost clients’ ROI and always-on access while minimising their IT administration demands,” said Steve Kelly, country manager, Storage, HP South Pacific. “HP LeftHand Storage provides the efficiencies, simplicity and scalability to meet the business goals of vBridge and its customers.”

HP’s premier Europe, Middle East and Africa client event, HP Discover, takes place Dec. 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany.

About HP

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