Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) > Case Studies > Red Bull Racing accelerates performance with hyperconverged IT

Red Bull Racing accelerates performance with hyperconverged IT

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

HPE SimpliVity

Tech Stack

VMware
VDI

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Red Bull Racing is a UK-based Formula One racing team that has been a competitive force in the sport since 2005. As of its 2016 season, the team has notched 53 wins and four double world championships, in part by adapting to design changes and new regulations with agility. The team designs, manufactures, and races its high-performance F1 vehicles. In addition, the on-site IT organization supports administrative functions such as marketing, finance, and human resources. A race car may be a finely tuned machine driven by a gifted athlete, but it is also a technology platform, generating around 400 GB of data on a race weekend.

The Challenge

Red Bull Racing, a competitive force in Formula One racing, relies heavily on IT for everything from business processes to vehicle design to onsite track support on race days. With proprietary, F1-specific applications generating significant amounts of data, the team needed a solution for its growing storage needs for the virtualized estate. The team's legacy infrastructure was slowing down performance. A mix of traditional virtualized servers plus virtual desktop infrastructure resulted in roughly 500 VMs spread across disparate hardware, creating a disjointed and heterogeneous environment. With 50 TB of data, infrastructure sprawl was becoming a costly liability, and software engineers using virtual desktops were noticing performance lags.

The Solution

Red Bull Racing's IT team considered both traditional architectures and hyperconverged infrastructure in its search for faster IT. The competitive selection process involved rigorous testing. Ultimately, the team decided on HPE SimpliVity. HPE SimpliVity now provides the basis for Red Bull Racing’s VMware and VDI estate, in addition to providing the team’s trackside infrastructure for race-day analysis. The difference is noticeable. For example, on race days the team offloads data in real time from a car, then post-processes it for analytics. With HPE SimpliVity, the time required for post-processing has gone from nine minutes to two minutes.

Operational Impact

HPE SimpliVity has made a difference in the organization’s backend systems, improving performance and responsiveness.
The improvements have brought welcome speed and agility to developers.
With built-in backup and recovery, HPE SimpliVity also made a big impact to Red Bull Racing’s workload and data recovery.
When the research and development team experienced a corruption, they needed to recover their virtual workstations quickly. With HPE SimpliVity, the IT team recovered the workstation in about one minute with only three clicks.

Quantitative Benefit

Time required for post-processing has gone from nine minutes to two minutes.
Greater than 50% reduction in time needed to post-process critical race data workloads.