Spot the odd ones out: Carrera, Cayman, Boxster, Macan, Cayenne, Synergy, GreenLake. Easy; Synergy and GreenLake aren’t Porsche cars – but they are being used by Porsche’s in-house IT operation.
Porsche Informatik is using HPE’s composable Synergy infrastructure through a GreenLake pay-for-what-you-use deal as its goes all-in on HPE for its data centre kit. These Synergy systems deliver IT services to 30,000 Porsche employees in 29 countries. They give Porsche a software‑defined infrastructure that assembles pools of physical and virtual computing, storage and networking fabric into configurations for specific workloads. And this is in a hybrid cloud environment.
Porsche Informatik took six months to compare market offerings, do its planning and run a test phase before going ahead with the HPE set-up
Initially this involved eight Synergy 12000 frames fitted with 38 x 480 Gen10 computer modules, using Xeon SP processors, which were installed and operational since January this year.
Another eight 12000 frames with 36 x 480 Gen10 and 16 dedicated NVIDIA graphic processors for virtual desktop infrastructure were added in July.
There are 32 Synergy all-flash DS3940 modules for storage, with more than 2.2 PB capacity presented through VMware’s vSAN. A single DS3940 has 40 drive bays with 12Gbit/s SAS connectivity for SSDs.
Porsche has a stretched cluster design across two data centres with 40GbitE links and automated failover.
It has an additional Synergy frame with 8 x 480 computing modules and 26 TB storage that serves as a test lab to simulate the production environment.
The Synergy setup has been tailored to work with VMware Cloud Foundation and is managed and monitored through HPE’s OneView.
This a nice flagship customer for HPE and to have Porsche use Synergy and GreenLake is a double win.
