Case Study: Dis-Chem achieves hyper‑speed performance and rapid scalability with Hitachi Vantara hyper‑converged vSAN solution

How Hitachi Helps Pharmaceutical Retailer Dis-Chem Speeds Performance

Dis-Chem, a leading South African pharmacy retailer with over 130 stores, needed to merge two disparate IT environments after an acquisition — one virtualized and one legacy — that lacked centralized storage and could not scale to support its growing courier business. To address this, Dis-Chem engaged Hitachi Vantara (with partner First Technology) and selected Hitachi Vantara’s hyper-converged approach using the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC with VMware vSAN.

Hitachi Vantara delivered a “data centre‑in‑a‑box” hyper-converged infrastructure (two Hitachi Unified Compute Platform HC systems powered by VMware vSAN) replicated to a disaster‑recovery site 15 km away, with implementation completed in a day. The Hitachi Vantara solution cut OS provisioning time from 48 minutes to 2 minutes, delivered high availability with no host failures reported, enabled rapid VM scaling instead of adding physical servers, and simplified management while providing the capacity and scalability Dis-Chem needs for future growth.

Dis-Chem

Lee Engelbrecht

Technical Manager