Case study
Porsche upgrades infrastructure to
improve availability and reduce costs
HP Converged Infrastructure replaces the ageing IT system
Industry
Automotive
Objective
HP Converged Infrastructure replaces the
ageing IT system
Approach
Looked at products from multiple vendors,
before choosing on the basis of price, relationship
and past good experience with HP products
IT matters
•Significantly cut energy consumption of servers,
contributing to cost savings and reducing
carbon emissions
•Saved considerable amount of time required
to manage infrastructure, freeing staff time
to handle other projects without requiring
extra recruitment
Business matters
•Reduced total cost of ownership, due to
virtualization of server environment
•Provided reliable, highly available infrastructure
for hosted application used by 100 franchised
Porsche dealers across Hungary
“The integrated and comprehensive
on-board administrator of the
HP BladeSystem means we can
manage the whole system quickly
from one browser window, with a
graphical presentation of everything
on one screen. It gives us a good view
of the health of the system, which
helps us troubleshoot quickly.”
– Andor Ludvig, head of system engineering group,
Porsche Hungaria
Improving availability
Porsche is one of the world’s best known automotive
companies, and is renowned for its performance cars.
Based in the capital Budapest, Porsche Hungaria is the
company’s Hungarian subsidiary. As well as Porsche cars,
it also imports vehicles from the wider Volkswagen Group,
including Audi, VW and Seat.
Case study | Porsche Hungaria
Challenge
Porsche is one of the world’s best known
automotive companies, and is renowned
for its performance cars. As you would
expect, it backs up the quality of its vehicles
with a comprehensive sales, repair and
support organization.
Based in the capital Budapest, Porsche
Hungaria is the company’s Hungarian
subsidiary. As well as Porsche cars, it also
imports vehicles from the wider Volkswagen
Group, including Audi, VW and Seat. Porsche
Hungaria sells and repairs cars through
its own Porsche Inter Auto brand, and also
supports around 100 franchized dealers
throughout Hungary.
The company runs its IT systems from a
server room at its main location in Budapest,
and also runs a smaller server room at its
warehouse site in the city’s suburbs. The
servers at head office are accessed by the
dealers over a Multiprotocol Label Switching
network infrastructure, using Virtual Private
Networks for security. The headquarters is
also connected to the Volkswagen Group’s
Salzburg regional base.
Reliability vital
The company recently found that its servers
and networking were struggling to keep
pace with the requirements placed on
them, both by its internal users and the
franchised dealers.
“We had an existing environment which
was four years old and out dated – we had
to change,” says Andor Ludvig, head of
the system engineering group at Porsche
Hungaria. “We were starting to experience
some problems, and troubleshooting was
slow. We were looking for a solution which
was comprehensive in its features, was easy
to manage and would enable us to provide
a stable system for the dealers and the
headquarters. It also needed to be scalable
to cope with future demands.”
Stability and availability are important to
Porsche Hungaria, not least because the
franchised dealers across the country
depend on the infrastructure, as Ludvig
comments: “The system must run reliably
with no downtime, so we required a solution
that would deliver high availability – this was
an important factor.”
The company’s existing infrastructure used
conventional servers, but Ludvig decided the
time was right to move to blade servers, as
he explains: “We chose a blade solution for
a range of benefits, but primarily because it
would give us a stable, compact, and easy to
manage system.”
Porsche has standardized globally on HP
as its main hardware supplier, as Ludvig
comments: “HP is our hardware standard:
we use HP for switches, printers, servers,
desktop PCs and laptops, and have done for
many years.” With its standardization policy,
the Hungarian subsidiary was still able to
make its own choice as to who would be the
best supplier for its local needs.
“We looked at products from other vendors,
including IBM and Cisco, but we decided that
HP was the best solution,” says Ludvig.
“We had a good relationship with HP
and knew its products, its proposal was
competitively priced, and we were satisfied
with the HP products we were already using.”
Solution
Converged Infrastructure for business
critical applications
Porsche Hungaria selected HP Converged
Infrastructure technologies that included
HP 2610 series switches and two HP c7000
BladeSystem enclosures. It uses a total
of 16 HP BL460c server blades as well as
conventional HP ProLiant DL360 servers,
with an HP FlexFabric module simplifying
the process of connecting the servers to
the network.
“We have a better overall solution because
everything is from one vendor, as there
are no problems or incompatibilities,” says
Ludvig. “We were confident we would have
no issues connecting the HP servers and
networking, which is why we chose all the
hardware from one company.
2
Case study | Porsche Hungaria
“Ninety five percent of our servers are
running Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003
or 2008,” says Ludvig. “We also have a few
Linux machines, and a couple running the
IBM AIX operating system because we have
some existing IBM servers we use for the
Oracle environment.”
The infrastructure includes Windows domain
controllers, file and printer servers as well
as database servers for the Oracle software
used by Porsche Hungaria. Other software
includes Microsoft SQL Server, and the
company’s own Cross application, developed
by Porsche Austria, which is used by its
dealers and its own Inter Auto team.
“We provide business critical applications
for dealers and distributors across the
country,” explains Ludvig. “They are logged
into the terminal server and that gives
them everything they need for running
the business, such as servicing and
sales information.”
HP worked with two local partners, Bitvadasz
and Szintezis in close cooperation with
the distributor CHS, to deliver the system.
“Porsche installed the infrastructure, and the
HP Technology Services Education pack was
included in the purchase – they taught us
how to use everything,” says Ludvig.
Space and power savings
Porsche Hungaria virtualizes its servers,
mostly with VMware vSphere 4.1, but also
with Microsoft Hyper-V for a few virtual
machines, to maximize the flexibility of
its environment.
“Virtualization has a lot of benefits: it is
cheaper, it is fast to make changes, and it
is easy to control centrally,” says Ludvig.
“Overall, I estimate that we have significantly
reduced the total cost of ownership of the IT
environment due to virtualization.”
Power savings are another of the major
benefits of virtualization and moving to
blade servers, and Porsche Hungaria has
reduced energy usage, contributing to cost
savings and reducing carbon emissions.
This is partly due to its usage of the
dynamic power management capabilities
of the HP BladeSystem, optimized for the
terminal environment.
The move to blade servers has also saved
space for the company, as Ludvig comments:
“We have a lot more room now, and the
compact system is convenient – the extra
space also makes it easier to add more
hardware in the future, making the system
more scalable.”
Simple management
The company’s IT department in Hungary
consists of 27 people, of whom 5 are in
Ludvig’s system engineering team and are
responsible for supporting and maintaining
the IT infrastructure. The team also remotely
manages a separate smaller cluster at the
warehouse site, which runs Windows Server
and is used for another Oracle database.
The new HP infrastructure has made
management much simpler, saving time for
Porsche’s team. Ludvig comments: “We have
a common console, and it is much easier to
manage and more flexible compared to our
previous environment.
“The integrated and comprehensive
on-board administrator of the HP BladeSystem
means we can manage the whole system
quickly from one browser window, with a
graphical presentation of everything on one
screen; this is a big benefit,” continues Ludvig.
“It gives us a good view of the health of
the system, which helps us troubleshoot
quickly – which is critical as we need to
respond to issues rapidly.”
3
Case study | Porsche Hungaria
Customer solution
at a glance
Applications
Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle databases
Hardware
•HP c7000 BladeSystem enclosure
•HP BL460c server blade
•HP ProLiant DL360 server
•HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric
10Gb/24-port module
•HP 2610 series switch
Software
•HP Insight Control
•HP Virtual Connect
•VMware vSphere 4.1
•Microsoft Hyper-V
•Microsoft Windows Server (2003 and 2008)
HP services
•HP Technology Services Education
•Three-year 24x7 support with four-hour
response time
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“The system is user friendly so it has a short
learning curve for new users,” says Ludvig.
“This also means people who are not fully
qualified can undertake simple tasks,
such as restarting a server.”
High availability
To ensure its infrastructure is reliable and
can support its dealers, Porsche Hungaria
has deployed redundant components
wherever possible.
Porsche Hungaria uses HP Virtual Connect
and FlexFabric technology, which adds a
virtualization layer to make it easy to connect
servers to the network. Each of its two c7000
enclosures contains two Virtual Connect
FlexFabric modules, which are connected
to the blade servers and to the HP 2610
series switch.
“The enclosure has a lot of fans, everything
is doubled and we are running two identical
systems,” says Ludvig. “The HP BladeSystem
itself includes redundancy and is highly
reliable on its own, but we bought two
because of the importance of high availability
– we could not just ask the dealers to wait if
the system went down.”
“The Virtual Connect manager software
makes it easy and quick to handle the
system,” says Ludvig. “I really like the profile
in Virtual Connect, which makes it possible to
replace a file or printer server by just making
an image, putting into a local bay, and then
the server is up and running again.
The company’s applications are divided
across its two c7000 enclosures, which both
run simultaneously. If one enclosure were
to fail, the infrastructure would continue to
operate with all functions intact, simply with
lower performance.
“Time saving is important because we have a
big environment to run – with the HP system,
we have considerably reduced the time
required to manage the infrastructure, which
frees up staff to handle other projects,” says
Ludvig. “We have many other tasks for the
IT team, and the time we have saved means
we can handle all of these without needing to
recruit extra people – hence saving money.”
Share with colleagues
“We are completely happy with the reliability
of the system,” says Ludvig. “It is stable, and
there have been no problems – just positives.
The HP Converged Infrastructure solution
has been excellent. It is state of the art
technology, it’s flexible, and everything
is the highest quality.”
Learn more at
hp.com/go/convergedinfrastructure
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4AA4-5518ENW, April 2013