Improving the health of IT operations to deliver exceptional membership services

The Norwegian Medical Association (NMA) is a professional association and trade union for physicians in Norway. Employing approximately 180 people, NMA works to protect the professional, social, and financial interests of its 37,000 members.

The NMA strives for high professional, scientific, and academic standards in medical education, at university and beyond. The NMA also takes an active part in the development of the healthcare system in Norway and is a trusted advisor to the Ministry of Health and Care Services.

The NMA serves members at every stage of their careers, from medical school to the workplace all the way through to retirement. It organizes professional and social events, helps members access legal assistance, offers training courses, supports applications for educational grants and scholarships, and more.

To deliver its services, the NMA relies on a wide variety of business applications, such as its mission-critical customer relationship management (CRM) system, running reliably. For this, the underlying infrastructure must be stable, deliver high performance, and simple to maintain.

In recent years, the NMA moved from a traditional storage area network (SAN) to a software-defined storage solution. However, the Dell hardware underpinning the Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) solution did not meet the team’s expectations in terms of performance or stability—a potential risk to overall service quality for members.

Soon after starting its search for a new S2D solution, the NMA found CTGlobal, an IT consultancy and development company focused on cloud, data center, security, and enterprise client management.

A Lenovo Gold Partner and ThinkAgile & Storage Expert Partner, CTGlobal proposed the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series—a fully software-defined platform powered by Microsoft Azure Stack HCI that includes Hyper-V virtualization and S2D technology.

Odd-Magne Kristoffersen, Solution Architect at NMA, says: “CTGlobal’s technical expertise and product knowledge were clear right from the beginning. CTGlobal presented the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Series as a robust, high-performance, all-in-one solution that would solve our challenges, which they backed up with customer testimonials. The CTGlobal team’s proven experience in implementing and supporting ThinkAgile MX solutions helped to seal the deal.”

With its core business applications now running on the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX platform, the NMA has seen a significant increase in reliability and performance. “We noticed an improvement for our critical Microsoft SQL Server and CRM workloads at once,” says Odd-Magne Kristoffersen. “Response times are faster, data loads quicker, and users are happier.”

With the new backup solution from Lenovo and Veeam, the NMA has also dramatically reduced backup windows from 14 hours to just 1 hour—93% faster.

Crucially, with the Lenovo ThinkAgile MX platform, the NMA gains a stable, high-performance, highly available infrastructure it knows it can rely on to support member services.

Hege Knudsen comments: “The Lenovo ThinkAgile MX platform, backed by CTGlobal support services, just works. It’s easy to manage, easy to maintain, and frees my team to focus on delivering value-added services. For example, when COVID-19 restrictions meant that face-to-face meetings could no longer go ahead, we stepped in to provide video conferencing services for members. We’ve hosted thousands of virtual meetings in the months since, some with as many as 16,000 participants.”