Zulma M. de Rivera

Dirección de Tecnología e Informática, Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama

The Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama manages the nation’s finances and formulates innovative new policies, supported by high-performance storage from Hitachi Vantara.

 

Supernova Award Category: 
Data to Decisions
The Problem: 

Panama is a leading international center for trade, logistics, tourism and financial services, with a fast-growing economy. To keep up with this rise in national prosperity, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama needed to formulate and implement new fiscal and social policies and coordinate public investment programs.

The Solution: 

To support the innovation and efficiency that comes with a fast-growing economy, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama determined they needed a new, future-proof storage infrastructure. With several key objectives in mind – increase storage capacity, availability and performance – they aimed to help users work more productively. After reviewing various proposals, they selected Hitachi Vantara channel partner Cable & Wireless Panama to implement Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) midrange systems. Hitachi Vantara’s extensive experience working with public sector organizations, along with their strong proposal outlining high levels of performance and security for key databases, was what ultimately led them to select this technology.

The Results: 

With Hitachi Vantara and Cable & Wireless Panama, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama was able to successfully build a modern, reliable and efficient storage infrastructure. With this, they have found high levels of performance and capacity needed to support key government business. This includes new application workloads and digital innovation projects that contribute to the country’s economic development.

Metrics: 
  • Boosted application availability with 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%.
    • Before this project, they were at 26 units of rack space. After, it was reduced to just eight – overall helping to reduce energy consumption and costs.
The Technology: 

The Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama leverages two Hitachi VSP E1090 arrays, equipped with NVMe flash drives for superior performance to support virtualization and database workloads. Additionally, they use two Hitachi VSP E590H hybrid arrays, with hard disk drives, to store backup data. To maximize available capacity, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama 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.

They also use Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Ops Center Analyzer to manage the whole environment through an intuitive graphical interface that helps to simplify and accelerate core storage management tasks.

 

Disruptive Factor: 

Previous to implementing Hitachi Vantara technology, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama was 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 more time out of their employees' busy days. With this project, they have created a future-proof storage infrastructure that tracks economic growth trends and manages an entire nation’s finances more effectively.

Regarding implementation, the process of data migration was smooth and efficient, allowing the solutions to be delivered sooner than expected, with a complete deployment to quickly follow.

Shining Moment: 

The Ministry of the Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama is most proud of the positive feedback received from their employees. They were able to ease the burden of delays in accessing data, improving efficiency in reporting and work in general.

About Ministry of Economy and Finance of the Republic of Panama

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.