Case Study Aston Martin 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 Formula One to deliver high performance for everything “HPE SimpliVity’s racing than speed. In a sport where wins are from its business processes to vehicle design decided by a hundredth of a second, every to onsite track support on race days. hyperconverged vehicle component and every decision infrastructure enables matters. Since 2005, UK-based Aston Martin With proprietary, F1-specific applications Red Bull Racing has been a competitive force generating significant amounts of data, us to get better answers in F1 racing. As of its 2018 season, the team Aston Martin Red Bull Racing needed quicker when we’re has notched 55 wins and four double world a solution for its growing storage needs championships, in part by adapting to design for the virtualized estate. “We needed on the racetrack and changes and new regulations with agility. to be more agile,” says Neil Bailey, head seconds count.” of IT infrastructure at Aston Martin IT plays a pivotal role in the team’s success. Red Bull Racing. “Application performance – Matt Cadieux, CIO, Aston Martin Aston Martin Red Bull Racing depends on IT affects how quickly we can react and make a Red Bull Racing The high-pressure world change to enhance vehicle performance.” With need to make sure the infrastructure is there of F1 racing efficiency and speed being of the essence, the and is very agile to support the needs of our organization explored hyperconverged IT and engineers and new business demands.” • Wins can result from a difference ultimately decided on HPE SimpliVity. of .01 seconds In addition, each year may bring new competitive challenges, technological • Teams have little time to react to Legacy infrastructure puts changing requirements advances, and changing F1 regulations. the brakes on performance When it comes to keeping up with the pace • Ultra-competitive field with the fastest of change, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s race cars in the world Based in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, infrastructure has to be able to move at the England, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing • Data-intensive environment has pace of the sport. significant storage needs designs, manufactures, and races its high- performance F1 vehicles. In addition, the on- site IT organization supports administrative A massive increase in functions such as marketing, finance, and performance human resources. Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s IT team A mix of traditional virtualized servers plus considered 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 Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s VMware and may be a finely tuned machine driven by VDI estate, in addition to providing the team’s a gifted athlete, but it is also a technology trackside infrastructure for race-day analysis. platform, generating around 400 GB of data The 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 Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s proprietary that means is we can get better answers F1 applications also demand fast and quicker when we’re on the racetrack and responsive infrastructure. “All of our cars are seconds count.” evolving prototypes, with 30,000 changes made a year,” says CIO Matt Cadieux. “We Greater than Faster performance on With built-in backup and recovery, HPE SimpliVity also made a big impact to and off the track Aston Martin Red Bull Racing’s workload At the Milton Keynes factory, HPE SimpliVity and data recovery. When the research and is making a difference in the organization’s development team experienced a corruption, 50% they needed to recover their virtual backend systems. “We’re in the process of migrating our email solution to HPE workstations quickly. With HPE SimpliVity, the reduction in time IT team recovered the workstation in about needed to post-process critical SimpliVity,” says Bailey. “The performance race data workloads gains are quite empowering.” one minute with only three clicks. Today, anyone on the IT team can perform this Tweet this But the organization has seen some of simple task. “Before, the process would have its biggest wins in its virtual desktop taken over an hour with multiple, complex infrastructure. “Straight away users noticed steps,” says Bailey. a big difference in terms of responsiveness,” says Bailey. Another area of improvement has Learn more at been the ability to back up and recover the www.hpe.com/info/simplivity 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, 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. 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 and Software Solution • HPE SimpliVity • Support for VMware • Support for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 Sign up for updates © Copyright 2018 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. A00036279ENW, March 2018, Rev. 1.