Case Study

Red Bull Racing accelerates performance with hyperconverged IT HPE SimpliVity delivers speed and responsiveness

Keeping up with the pace of change

Nothing matters more in racing performance for everything from its business than speed. In a sport where wins are decided processes to vehicle design to onsite track “HPE SimpliVity’s by a hundredth of a second, every vehicle support on race days. component and every decision matters. hyperconverged Since 2005, UK-based Racing has With proprietary, F1-specific applications infrastructure enables been a competitive force in F1 racing. As of generating significant amounts of data, Red its 2016 season, the team has notched 53 Bull Racing needed a solution for its growing us to get better answers wins and four double world championships, in storage needs for the virtualized estate. “We quicker when we’re on the part by adapting to design changes and new needed to be more agile,” says Neil Bailey, regulations with agility. head of IT infrastructure at Red Bull Racing. racetrack and seconds “Application performance affects how quickly count.” IT plays a pivotal role in the team’s success. we can react and make a change to enhance Red Bull Racing depends on IT to deliver high vehicle performance.” With efficiency and – Matt Cadieux, CIO, Red Bull Racing The high-pressure world speed being of the essence, the organization is very agile to support the needs of our of F1 racing explored hyperconverged IT and ultimately engineers and new business demands.” decided on HPE SimpliVity. • Wins can result from a difference In addition, each year may bring new of .01 seconds Legacy infrastructure puts competitive challenges, technological advances, and changing F1 regulations. • Teams have little time to react to the brakes on performance changing requirements When it comes to keeping up with the pace of change, Red Bull Racing’s infrastructure Based in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, • Ultra-competitive field with the fastest has to be able to move at the pace of race cars in the world , Red Bull Racing designs, the sport. manufactures, and races its high-performance • Data-intensive environment has significant storage needs F1 vehicles. In addition, the on-site IT organization supports administrative A massive increase in functions such as marketing, finance, and performance human resources. Red Bull Racing’s IT team considered A mix of traditional virtualized servers plus both traditional architectures and virtual desktop infrastructure resulted in hyperconverged infrastructure in its search roughly 500 VMs spread across disparate for faster IT. The competitive selection hardware, creating a disjointed and process involved rigorous testing. “We went heterogeneous environment. With 50 TB through a formal benchmarking exercise,” of data, infrastructure sprawl was becoming explains Cadieux. “We took real workloads a costly liability, and software engineers and asked vendors to impress us, and using virtual desktops were noticing HPE SimpliVity impressed both in terms of performance lags. performance and ease of management.”

F1-specific use cases added urgency to HPE SimpliVity now provides the basis for finding a faster storage solution. A race car Red Bull Racing’s VMware and VDI estate, may be a finely tuned machine driven by in addition to providing the team’s trackside a gifted athlete, but it is also a technology infrastructure for race-day analysis. The platform, generating around 400 GB of data difference is noticeable. For example, on on a race weekend. Crucial decisions—such race days the team offloads data in real as when to “pit” a car during a race—depend time from a car, then post-processes it for on lightning-fast analysis conducted by a analytics. With HPE SimpliVity, the time portable data center that is set up trackside required for post-processing has gone from on race day. nine minutes to two minutes. “It’s a massive increase in performance,” says Cadieux. “What Red Bull Racing’s proprietary F1 applications that means is we can get better answers also demand fast and responsive quicker when we’re on the racetrack and infrastructure. “All of our cars are evolving seconds count.” prototypes, with 30,000 changes made a year,” says CIO Matt Cadieux. “We need to make sure the infrastructure is there and Greater than Faster performance on With built-in backup and recovery, HPE SimpliVity also made a big impact to Red and off the track Bull Racing’s workload and data recovery. At the Milton Keynes factory, HPE SimpliVity When the research and development team is making a difference in the organization’s experienced a corruption, they needed to 50% recover their virtual workstations quickly. With backend systems. “We’re in the process of migrating our email solution to HPE HPE SimpliVity, the IT team recovered the reduction in time workstation in about one minute with only needed to post-process critical SimpliVity,” says Bailey. “The performance race data workloads gains are quite empowering.” three clicks. Today, anyone on the IT team can perform this simple task. “Before, the process Tweet this But the organization has seen some of would have taken over an hour with multiple, its biggest wins in its virtual desktop complex steps,” says Bailey. infrastructure. “Straight away users noticed a big difference in terms of responsiveness,” Learn more at says Bailey. Another area of improvement has www.hpe.com/info/simplivity been the ability to back up and recover the Citrix VDI environment in the event of failure. For developers who chafe at any delay, the improvements have brought welcome speed and agility. Says Bailey, “Our users were impressed.”

“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, Red Bull Racing

Case study Industry Red Bull Racing Automotive

Objective Approach Improve performance and increase agility Rev up business performance with while reducing storage costs. HPE SimpliVity.

IT Matters Business Matters • Expand application performance • Reduce IT costs • Increase responsiveness and flexibility • Accelerate speed of decision making • Simplify management • Free up time to focus on F1 innovation

Customer at a Glance Hardware • HPE Simplivity

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