Intelligent Data Centres Issue 20 | Page 58

intelligent INFRASTRUCTURE

Aruba and Lenovo partner to transform Ducati Motors ’ IT infrastructure

Ducati Motor Holding benefits from

a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure which at the beginning of last year had launched a fully customised project aimed at enhancing the performance of its IT architecture , as well as increase the resilience of the services it provides . One of the main objectives was to renew its existing technological approach by tapping into the cloud and creating a hybrid approach . To do this , it made use of the collaboration and knowledge of two of the most innovative and leading IT companies within their respective sectors : Aruba Enterprise and Lenovo .
Aruba Enterprise proposed a project that encompassed completely different hardware and configuration settings to Ducati ’ s previous infrastructure . The approach has totally transformed its traditional architectures and logics to enable a new data centre concept . Aruba assisted in renewing Ducati ’ s on-premises data centre hardware in the form of a service in Private Cloud mode . This allowed for entirely dedicated cloud solution to guarantee the highest level of security , as well as a Disaster Recovery environment within the Aruba Global
Cloud Data Centre for the company ’ s critical applications in Borgo Panigale .
At the same time , Lenovo worked with Ducati to design and implement the upgrade of its HPC cluster , based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 , SR630 and SR650 servers . It is equipped with the latest generation Intel Xeon scalable processors and NVIDIA Tesla M10 GPUs , V100 and connected with Lenovo ’ s ThinkSystem NE1032 RackSwitch Low Latency Switch . In parallel to the HPC project , Ducati also used Lenovo technology in the configuration of its two new data centres : one at the Borgo Panigale ( Bologna ) and the other at the Disaster Recovery ( DR ) site in Ponte San Pietro ( Bergamo ). Together , both data centres contain 20 ThinkSystem SR630 servers and four ThinkSystem SR550 servers , configured as Active / Active clusters with Production and Development / Test workloads distributed across the two sites . This configuration allows Ducati to apply failover procedures in the event of a disaster with minimum downtime . The implementation can be activated at a later stage in the Business Continuity project , as well as being
GDPR compliant by design and providing protection for mission critical apps .
The choice proved to be a successful one , especially given the recent period of uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 . The design of the infrastructure has allowed Ducati to ‘ transform ’ from a desk-centric company into a mobile-first company in a few days , while maintaining efficient operations and performance . One of the main advantages of the new solution is having a customised infrastructure ready for extension and up-scaling .
Ducati now has complete freedom to use all computational resources dedicated to Disaster Recovery to test and develop environments , as if they were primary resources . This way , the company has access to more computing power and can take advantage of the test machines for new products , while improving the time required to market its business .
Similarly , Ducati has been able to migrate workloads from its main headquarters to peripheral sites , the Disaster Recovery site , using this as an active site and not exclusively for data recovery . ◊
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