Migdal Supports Millions of Customers With a High-availability Infrastructure

Overview

Challenge

• Support thousands of users accessing the most critical business environment while providing microsecond-level response times.

Solution

• Improve storage performance, availability, and scalability with all-flash arrays and active-active clustering.

Outcome

• Delivers exceptional user experiences with microsecond-level response times.
• Keeps customer-facing applications online, nonstop, even in extreme scenarios.
  Supports cost-efficient management of growing data with flexible scalability.
• Simplifies monitoring of the entire storage landscape.
• Boosts resilience with an active-active architecture between sites 150 kilometers apart.

Challenge

Providing market-leading services

More than 2.4 million private and corporate customers trust Migdal to provide long-term financial security and a more prosperous future. Founded in 1934 and now a leading Israeli finance group, Migdal offers insurance, pensions, savings funds, and investments.

Customers and employees expect fast, uninterrupted access to Migdal's core applications to help them monitor and manage their insurance and investment plans. But with online touchpoints and data volumes reaching new heights, pressure was growing on the company's storage and backup environment.

To mitigate the risk of downtime and ensure a first-class user experience, Migdal looked to improve infrastructure performance, scalability, and manageability. The company targeted a solution that would minimize application response times and ensure rapid recovery in case of disaster.

Solution

Ensuring nonstop operations

Migdal turned to trusted partner Hitachi Vantara to support the infrastructure modernization program. To underpin its open systems environment, the company selected Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5500 all-flash systems, with VSP G700 and VSP G370.

Using Hitachi Global-Active Device to migrate data, Migdal was able to complete the upgrade without disruption to day-to-day operations. To optimize systems availability, Migdal also harnesses Global-Active Device to enable an active-active architecture between data centers 150 kilometers apart. In addition, Migdal uses Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR) for asynchronous replication to transfer a few less-critical workloads between sites.

For end-to-end management and monitoring of the storage environment, Migdal deployed Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer. Meanwhile, to streamline backup and recovery processes, the company added Hitachi Data Protection Suite, powered by Commvault.

“Hitachi Ops Center has significantly improved our storage management capabilities,” reports Migdal’s Storage and Backup Infrastructure Team Leader, Michael Perelshtein. “We now monitor our entire environment in a simple and unified way through a single point of control, with deep visibility into performance and capacity.”

Working with Hitachi Vantara, Migdal deployed the storage arrays and software and completed the data migration without disruption to business operations.

Outcome

Recovering rapidly after incidents

With the Hitachi infrastructure, Migdal has strengthened business continuity, ensuring users enjoy nonstop access to key online systems. The company now measures application response times in microseconds and has robust protection against downtime, with rapid recovery — even in extreme scenarios.

Igal Aharonovich, who serves as the Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Migdal, recalls: “When an entire production site went out of service due to a malfunction at Israel Electric Corporation, we did not experience any disruption to our operations or data loss and continued to deliver for our customers, thanks to the active-active solution.”

The flexible scalability of the Hitachi VSP 5500 arrays has proved invaluable to Migdal for managing fast-growing data volumes cost-efficiently and without complexity.

“We now have a multidimensional, on-demand growth capability," says Ofer Ben Artzy, who works in Migdal’s Technology Division as Head of IT Infrastructure. "We can either scale out or scale up our capacity, expanding each component individually and independently of other hardware and software.”

Migdal’s VP and Chief Procurement Officer Efraim Eckerling, sums up the company's experience with Hitachi: “We looked for a partner to help us through this long and complex project. We wanted professionalism, originality, flexibility, honesty, and endless patience. In Hitachi Vantara, we found what we needed. And in light of our success, we are exploring new collaborations.”