Aruba Enterprise and Ducati Motor Holding develop new generation data centre

Aruba Enterprise has developed an innovative solution to meet the needs of the Italian motorcycle manufacturer, Ducati Motor Holding.

The Italian automotive manufacturer is at the forefront of innovation and is undergoing a large-scale digital transformation. This, in part, is to meet the growing need to comply with industry regulations and Ducati Motor Holding needed a partnership that would offer the best infrastructures and solutions on the market.

To renew its approach to the cloud and optimise IT infrastructures already existing at Ducati’s base in Northern Italy - Borgo Panigale, Aruba Enterprise created a project that changed the traditional approach to architectures and enables a new concept of how data centres can be used. This innovative approach is characterised by maximum customisation and a hybrid solution that involves both data centres, the existing one at Borgo Panigale and Aruba’s Global Cloud Data Center (GCDC).

The project tackles three primary objectives for Ducati:

• Renew the hardware of Ducati's on-premise data centre, provided as a service in the Private Cloud. To achieve this using existing infrastructure present at Borgo Panigale, the Aruba Enterprise division designed an infrastructure comprised of Lenovo servers and storage components, and NetApp for on-premise backup

• Provide Ducati with a wholly dedicated Cloud solution to guarantee the highest level of security and secrecy;

• Create a Disaster Recovery environment within the Global Cloud Data Center for the essential applications located on the on-premise systems at Ducati;

This New Generation Data Center is an extension of Ducati Motor Holding’s current data centre. Aruba Enterprise’s engineers and project managers’ IT architectural design skills and ability enabled them to design a hybrid data centre relying on an on-premise hybrid cloud solution in Borgo Panigale and another one in the Global Cloud Data Center.

This comes in addition to the service provided by the Global Cloud Data Center and acts as an extension of the Ducati cloud that can migrate its workloads from the Borgo Panigale site to the GCDC without service interruption and can also become a disaster recovery site if needed.

Among the main advantages of the new solution designed for Ducati:

• Customisation and time to market - having a personalised infrastructure available has provided Ducati with the freedom to use the computational resources available for Disaster Recovery as well as a test environment as if they were primary resources. Ducati has more computing power available and can benefit from test machines for new products and at the same time improve time to market for its business;

• Resilience and data security - the solution guarantees maximum data security as data is replicated between the primary and secondary site. Furthermore, in terms of physical security, the Global Cloud Data Center is an enterprise-level data centre, accredited according to the ANSI / TIA 942 standard, Rating 4, and therefore meets and exceeds the reference standards.

Konstantin Kostenarov, CTO Ducati Motor Holding commented: “The increased resilience of our data and a drastic shortening of the time to market powers the innovation that we bring with our bikes and is a key distinguishing  factor."

“We are proud to be working on this project with Ducati to renew and enhance its existing IT infrastructure,” commented Giorgio Girelli, Aruba Enterprise General Manager “Sharing and combining the knowledge of our two companies, specialised in two distinct and specific sectors, has given shape to a genuinely innovative project as we have shared experiences, in terms of technology, performance and research, gained in the motor and IT, cloud services and data centres industries. This is an ideal synergy to get maximum performance. "