Case Study

Aston Martin accelerates performance with hyperconverged IT HPE SimpliVity delivers speed and responsiveness

“HPE SimpliVity’s hyperconverged Keeping up with the pace of change infrastructure enables Nothing matters more in racing to deliver high performance for everything than speed. In a sport where wins are decided from its business processes to vehicle design us to get better answers by a hundredth of a second, every vehicle to onsite track support on race days. quicker when we’re component and every decision matters. Since 2005, UK-based Aston Martin Red Bull Racing With proprietary, F1-specific applications on the racetrack and has been a competitive force in F1 racing. generating significant amounts of data, Aston seconds count.” As of the beginning of the 2019 season, Martin Red Bull Racing needed a solution for the team has notched 59 wins and 8 world its growing storage needs for the virtualized –Matt Cadieux, CIO, Aston Martin championships, in part by adapting to design estate. “We needed to be more agile,” says Red Bull Racing changes and new regulations with agility. Neil Bailey, head of IT infrastructure at Aston Martin Red Bull Racing. “Application IT plays a pivotal role in the team’s success. performance affects how quickly we can Aston Martin Red Bull Racing depends on IT react and make a change to enhance vehicle The high-pressure world performance.” With efficiency and speed being year,” says CIO Matt Cadieux. “We need to of F1 racing of the essence, the organization explored make sure the infrastructure is there and • Wins can result from a difference of hyperconverged IT and ultimately decided is very agile to support the needs of our .01 seconds on HPE SimpliVity. engineers and new business demands.” • Teams have little time to react to changing requirements Legacy infrastructure puts In addition, each year may bring new • Ultra-competitive field with the fastest competitive challenges, technological race cars in the world the brakes on performance advances, and changing F1 regulations. • Data-intensive environment has Based in Milton Keynes in , When it comes to keeping up with the pace significant storage needs , Aston Martin Red Bull Racing of change, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s designs, manufactures, and races its infrastructure has to be able to move at the high-performance F1 vehicles. In addition, pace of the sport. the on-site IT organization supports administrative functions such as marketing, A massive increase in HPE SimpliVity helped finance, and human resources. Aston Martin Red Bull speed-up its A mix of traditional virtualized servers plus Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s IT team infrastructure. virtual desktop infrastructure resulted in considered both traditional architectures and roughly 500 VMs spread across disparate hyperconverged infrastructure in its search for hardware, creating a disjointed and faster IT. The competitive selection process heterogeneous environment. With 50 TB involved rigorous testing. “We went through of data, infrastructure sprawl was becoming a formal benchmarking exercise,” explains a costly liability, and software engineers Cadieux. “We took real workloads and asked using virtual desktops were noticing vendors to impress us, and HPE SimpliVity performance lags. impressed both in terms of performance and ease of management.” F1-specific use cases added urgency to finding a faster storage solution. A race car HPE SimpliVity provides the basis for Aston may be a finely tuned machine driven by Martin Red Bull Racing’s VMware® and VDI a gifted athlete, but it is also a technology estate, both in the factory and trackside platform, generating around 400 GB of data for race-day operations. The difference is on a race weekend. Crucial decisions—such noticeable. For example, on race days, the as when to “pit” a car during a race—depend team offloads data from a car in real time, on lightning-fast analysis conducted by a then post-processes it for analytics. With portable data center that is set up trackside HPE SimpliVity, the time required for post- on race day. processing has gone from nine minutes to two minutes. “It’s a massive increase in Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s proprietary F1 performance,” says Cadieux. “What that means applications also demand fast and responsive is we can get better answers quicker when infrastructure. “All of our cars are evolving we’re on the racetrack and seconds count.” prototypes, with 30,000 changes made a Faster performance on Both within the factory and trackside, the Greater than organization has seen some of its biggest and off the track wins in its virtual desktop infrastructure. At the Milton Keynes factory, HPE SimpliVity “Straightaway, users noticed a big difference is making a difference in the organization’s in terms of responsiveness,” says Bailey. backend systems. 80% of the organization’s 50% Another area of improvement has been the business critical apps are running on HPE reduction in time SimpliVity. This ranges from the system that ability to backup and recover the Citrix® VDI needed to post-process critical manages parts lifecycle management to email. environment in the event of failure. HPE race data workloads SimpliVity also made a big impact on Aston Having achieved significant benefits in the Martin Red Bull Racing’s workload and data Tweet this factory, it was time to help their race team. recovery. When the research and development “By bringing HPE SimpliVity to support our team experienced a corruption, they needed trackside operations, we’ve been able to to recover their virtual workstations quickly. deliver a more reliable, faster, and optimized With HPE SimpliVity, the IT team recovered IT infrastructure,” states Simon Kesslar-Lyne, the workstation in about one minute and with Head of Event IT. “This enables our trackside only three clicks. Today, anyone on the IT engineers to focus on car performance, team can perform this simple task. “Before, the knowing that they can rely on the IT process would have taken over an hour with infrastructure to deliver and backup the multiple, complex steps,” says Bailey. data that they need.” Learn more at There are 21 race locations to transport the hpe.com/info/simplivity team’s IT equipment to every season. Systems need to be quickly setup and shut down for each event. Trackside space is a challenge and power surges or outages can be quite an issue. Confidence in the systems is key.

“When we moved users over to HPE SimpliVity, the feedback was really positive. Users noticed a big difference in levels of performance.” – Neil Bailey, Head of IT Infrastructure, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing Case Study Industry Aston Martin Automotive Red Bull Racing

Objective Approach Improve performance and increase agility Rev up business performance with while reducing storage costs at the central HPE SimpliVity. factory and remote trackside events.

IT Matters Business Matters • Expand application performance • Reduce IT costs • Compact/smaller footprint at trackside sites • Reliable, compact platform uses less power • Increase responsiveness and flexibility • Accelerate speed of decision making • Simplify management • Free up time to focus on F1 innovation

Customer at a Glance Hardware and Software Solution • HPE SimpliVity • HPE SimpliVity with optional GPU accelerators • Support for VMware • Support for Citrix VDI

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