Porsche selects HPE for five-year software-defined datacentre strategy

Porsche Informatik has signed a contract with HPE to provide a hybrid cloud infrastructure with pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure.

The in-house IT service provider for Porsche Holding Salzburg (PHS) plans to use the “as-a-service” offering from HPE to increase agility, reduce cost and complexity, and deliver a cloud experience for 30,000 employees, its global dealer network and its customers.

HPE was selected to provide the equipment, management software and pay-per-use financing to enable PHS to migrate to a software-defined datacentre over the next five years.

“In today’s automotive industry, organisations must be fast and agile to remain competitive. The development time for new technologies and time to market are getting shorter, while digitisation advances continuously,” said Peter Friedwagner, head of infrastructure and common platforms at Porsche Informatik.

“HPE provides Porsche Informatik the flexibility to consume hybrid cloud computing power as a service, supporting a high degree of automation efficiency combined with state-of-the-art security.”

Since the start of 2019, Porsche Informatik has been deploying HPE Synergy components in its datacentre facility and has been using HPE GreenLake to provide computing on-demand.

It introduced a software-defined infrastructure that enables the company to assemble flexible pools with physical and virtual computing, storage and fabric into any configuration and for any workload. 

According to HPE, GreenLake as a service optimises operations through metering and capacity management, providing Porsche Informatik with a fully managed hybrid cloud environment in which it only pays for what it consumes. GreenLake operates across on-premise and off-premise datacentres and supports virtual machines and containers. The company can plan capacity ahead of use to avoid over-provisioning.

Since implementing HPE GreenLake and HPE Synergy, Porsche Informatik said it has improved application performance, decreased datacentre complexity and increased responsiveness, allowing the whole company to innovate and better serve employees, dealers and customers on a global scale. 

At the start of the year, Porsche Informatik deployed eight HPE Synergy 12000 frames equipped with 38 HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 computer modules. By the end of June, another eight frames with 36 HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 and 16 dedicated Nvidia graphic processors was deployed to support virtual desktop infrastructure. It has now deployed eight HPE Synergy 480 computing modules and 26TB (terabytes) storage that serves as a test lab.

Porsche Informatik said VMware vSAN running on 32 HPE Synergy DS3940s is being used to provide the business with a combined capacity of more than 2.2PB (petabytes) of scalable storage. The storage infrastructure spans two datacentres and offers automated failover.

The new IT infrastructure currently runs Office 365, databases and PHS’s virtual desktop environment. In 2020, the company plans to migrate its dealer network onto the new infrastructure.