Panama’s Ministry of the Economy and Finance manages the nation’s finances and formulates innovative new policies, supported by high-performance storage from Hitachi Vantara.
“With the Hitachi storage, we have increased data throughput rates and cut application response times. Users no longer face delays when accessing data, so they can generate reports faster and work more productively.”
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Javier Collado, Head of Comm., Network & Data Center
As a leading international center for trade, logistics, tourism and financial services, Panama is one of the fastest-growing economies in Central America and the Caribbean. Based in Panama City, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama aims to sustain the rise in national prosperity by formulating and implementing new fiscal and social policies and coordinating public investment programs.
To manage Panama’s economic affairs effectively, the Ministry relies on a variety of applications, as well as speedy access to Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases to track economic data and generate reports. The Ministry is also creating new digital initiatives to streamline administrative processes and enhance citizen services. Previously, they supported these application workloads with an extensive legacy storage environment that was approaching capacity.
According to Javier Collado, Head of Communications, Network and Data Center at the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama, “We were relying on aging spinning disk storage arrays that offered limited performance, reliability and scalability. Over time, this started to have a negative impact on database response times, so accessing key information and creating management reports was taking longer.”
To support innovation and internal efficiency, the Ministry targeted a new, future-proof storage infrastructure. The key objectives for the project were increasing storage capacity, availability and performance, to help users work more productively. The Ministry initiated a search for a new partner that could deliver best-in-class enterprise storage systems along with strong support capabilities.
To find the right storage infrastructure partner, the Ministry launched a public tender process. After assessing various proposals, they selected Hitachi Vantara channel partner Cable & Wireless Panama to implement Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) midrange systems.
“Cable & Wireless and Hitachi Vantara possess strong experience working with public sector organizations,” Collado said. “Their proposal not only met all of our requirements, it also promised exceptionally high levels of performance, security and availability for our key applications and databases.”
Working with Cable & Wireless Panama, the Ministry installed, configured and tested the new Hitachi VSP systems, before migrating data from the previous infrastructure. “The implementation and data migration went smoothly,” Collado added. “Cable & Wireless and Hitachi delivered the solutions sooner than expected, so we were able to complete the deployment efficiently and quickly.”
The Ministry now supports virtualization and database workloads with two Hitachi VSP E1090 arrays, equipped with NVMe flash drives for superior performance. Alongside them, the Ministry uses two Hitachi VSP E590H hybrid arrays, with hard disk drives, to store backup data. To maximize available capacity, the Ministry takes advantage of Hitachi’s built-in data compression and deduplication capabilities. Cable & Wireless will also deliver ongoing support and optimization services throughout the lifecycle of the new systems.
In addition, the Ministry uses Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Ops Center Analyzer to manage the whole environment via a single pane of glass. “Hitachi Ops Center provides an intuitive graphical interface that helps to simplify and accelerate core storage management tasks, such as provisioning,” Collado said.
Working with Hitachi Vantara and Cable & Wireless Panama, the Ministry has successfully built a modern, reliable and efficient storage infrastructure to support key government business. This includes high levels of performance and capacity needed to support new application workloads and digital innovation projects that will contribute to the country’s ongoing economic development.
Feedback from employees has been positive. Javier Collado explained, “With the Hitachi storage, we have increased data throughput rates and cut application response times. Users no longer face delays when accessing data, so they can generate reports faster and work more productively.”
The Ministry also boosted application availability, achieving 100% uptime with the Hitachi VSP arrays. Consolidating their older storage environment with more powerful, compact systems also reduced rack space requirements in its data centers by 69% – from 26 units to just eight. This streamlined environment will help to reduce energy consumption and costs.
Javier Collado concluded, “With the Hitachi systems and support from Cable & Wireless, we have a solution that meets our needs today and well into the future. We have built a storage infrastructure that will help the Ministry to track economic growth trends and manage the nation’s finances more effectively.”
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