HP has today announced that Northland Regional Council (NRC) has selected HP Converged Infrastructure to improve employee productivity within the New Zealand government agency.

Conditions of the agreement will see the tech company increase the performance, scalability and efficiency of NRC's virtualised IT environment.

Providing environmental and emergency management, public transport planning and funding, and coastal navigation and safety services, NRC serves 159,000 residents in northern New Zealand.

The agency says it's existing storage infrastructure was unable to support rapid data growth or upgrades to web applications used by constituents. Plus, reduced performance of NRC’s business-critical applications due to the aging infrastructure was hindering productivity of the organisation’s 176 employees.

“Our existing IT infrastructure just couldn’t support business-critical applications and kept us from efficiently delivering services to constituents,” says Daniel Blake, senior systems engineer, Northland Regional Council.

Blake says NRC upgraded to HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HP ProLiant DL380p Generation 8 (Gen8) servers.

“Since upgrading to HP Converged Infrastructure, our virtual environment runs so much faster, we’ve been able to increase staff productivity by spending less time on data center administration and more time enhancing public services," he says.

NRC also implemented HP 3PAR Thin Provisioning Software to improve storage efficiency and asset utilisation, with Blake claiming the agency saved approximately 50% in storage capacity.

“Rapid data growth created by greater demand for citizen services can hamper a government agency’s ability to deliver services,” says Phillip Martin, Storage Business Unit Manager, HP New Zealand.

"With the efficiency, scalability and performance of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage, Northland Regional Council delivers improved service capabilities and productivity by ensuring uninterrupted access to data and applications for constituents and employees.”