How Porsche Informatik is transforming to a software-defined data center

[John_Carter]

In today’s automotive industry, the development time for new technologies and time-to-market are getting shorter, while digitalization advances continuously. And to stay competitive, businesses must keep pace.

That's why it was time for Porsche Informatik, a wholly owned subsidiary and IT service provider of Porsche Holding, to modernize its IT components. Their vision, “to create pioneering software solutions for the mobility of the future”, required a complete renovation of their data center. What may have at first sounded like a straightforward challenge, has turned out to be one of the most innovative data center approaches in Austria.

Today all IT equipment and services come from a single source, thanks to HPE. The high-performance computing platform, HPE Synergy, is the backbone of the Salzburg IT environment of Porsche Holding's in-house IT service provider. HPE GreenLake, an industry-first service model, based on the pay-per-use principle, has also been adopted. For Porsche Informatik this complete solution is not only an important move towards fulfilling the digitalization needs of the automotive industry, but is above all, a vital step on their way to becoming a ‘software-defined’ data center.

By embracing new automotive technologies, Porsche Informatik has witnessed rapid growth in its business and data centers. With about 30,000 Porsche employees in 29 countries across a global network of automotive dealers from the VW Group, the Porsche Informatik team needs to keep track of its hybrid cloud infrastructure, while controlling the entire computing environment and individual workflows. In addition, Porsche Informatik’s data centers needs to be highly available and efficient to support its business-critical applications.

Porsche Informatik chose a clear path to designing their new data center, via software, and therefore towards agility. With HPE Synergy, the IT service provider introduced a software-defined infrastructure that, in hybrid cloud environments, quickly and easily assembles flexible pools with physical and virtual computing, storage, and fabric, into any configuration and workload. Their approach is tailored to work seamlessly with the hybrid cloud services platform, VMware Cloud Foundation, and is customized for the specific requirements of Porsche Informatik.

HPE GreenLake completes the solution, with the main differentiator underlying this flexible service model being a consumption-based approach. Porsche Informatik only pays, on a monthly basis, for the computing power that is used.

“The combination of HPE Synergy and HPE GreenLake gives Porsche Informatik the best of both worlds,” explains Markus Dallinger, Enterprise Account Manager at HPE Austria. “The overall solution combines the highest computing power, simple and centrally controlled system management, high level of automatization and security of an on-premise infrastructure with the technological and economic flexibility of private cloud services. The result is an unparalleled return on investment. We definitely forged a future-oriented solution from a single mold for Porsche Informatik.”

• View the press release
• Learn more in the case study
• Check out the video

John Carter
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_Servers
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-servers-and-systems/
hpe.com/servers