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 the two 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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