Supporting Austria’s Agriculture with Robust and Reliable Storage Infrastructure

Overview

Challenge

• Support Austrian agriculture by delivering effective financial, marketing, and operational services to 130,000 farms.

Solution

• Modernize data storage with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E790 to deliver highly reliable and efficient services.

Outcome

• Benefit from proactive Hitachi support and maintenance and ensure consistent performance for crucial workflows and processes.

Challenge

Agrarmarkt Austria (AMA) supports the international success and sustainable development of agriculture in Austria. The organization is part of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Regions and Water Management and is tasked with helping around 130,000 farms in the country to reach their full potential.

AMA offers a wide range of services, such as collecting and publishing market data and developing marketing strategies, and is a driving force behind quality management around organic farming and animal welfare. With annual exports of over €16 billion, the agricultural sector is highly important for the Austrian economy, and the AMA helps to strengthen the international competitiveness of its products.

To increase its efficiency and deliver modern services to farmers and partners, AMA relies on digital processes. The organization manages a complex IT environment with a range of mission-critical business applications running on VMware virtualization technology. To ensure smooth operations and prepare for future data growth, AMA was looking to upgrade its central data storage solution.

Solution

AMA worked closely with its infrastructure partner Huemer Group to evaluate different storage vendors. After careful consideration, AMA selected a fully redundant Hitachi Vantara solution to ensure the highest levels of availability and performance. Harald Schmidradler, Head of Operative Business at AMA, says: “The Hitachi solution offers great performance and scalability. The built-in reliability and efficiency features help ensure business continuity for our important systems and applications.”

Together with Huemer Group, AMA deployed two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) E790 systems across two separate data centers. The high-performance architecture, optimized for all-flash NVMe storage, provides transparent failover from one location to the other, maximizing the availability of mission-critical systems such as SAP business applications and Oracle Database with geospatial features to enable advanced mapping and analytics.

AMA uses advanced prioritization features within the Hitachi storage to deliver the best performance for the most important applications and processes. Thanks to the built-in adaptive data reduction technology based on data compression and data deduplication, AMA can also use available storage capacity more effectively.

Outcome

Farmers and exporters depend on support and insights from AMA to drive their businesses. By working with Hitachi and Huemer Group, AMA has successfully modernized its data storage infrastructure and gained the performance and flexibility it needs to provide fast and reliable IT services to its members.

Today, digital processes for farm surveys, geographic analysis, financial management, and subsidies run smoother, helping AMA’s  180 employees to work more efficiently in the head office and in the field. Harald Schmidradler adds: “Thanks to Huemer Group and Hitachi, we got our IT infrastructure to a whole new level. Now we are ready for the challenges of the digital future in the agricultural sector.”

The comprehensive support and maintenance services from Hitachi make a big difference for IT operations and planning at AMA. Harald Schmidradler says: “Hitachi routinely analyzes our systems and recommends important updates and optimizations. The Hitachi service helps us to deliver consistent high-quality IT services.”

Harald Schmidradler concludes: “The Hitachi support and proactive maintenance services are a huge advantage– they have proven their value many times.”