Onel modernises Melbourne Racing Club's IT infrastructure

Melbourne Racing Club (MRC) has completed a significant IT infrastructure upgrade in conjunction with its Caulfield Racecourse reconstruction.

The work was done by MRC's chosen IT partner Onel in Melbourne, which made its first appearance in CRN's Fast50 this year.

Onel implemented a suite of HPE solutions to address MRC's challenges, which included performance issues, reliability concerns, and high legacy infrastructure renewal costs.

Technically, the new infrastructure comprises:

HPE dHCI (disaggregated hyper-converged infrastructure): This solution combines the simplicity of HCI with the flexibility of converged infrastructure, allowing for independent scaling of compute and storage resources.

Alletra NVMe storage: HPE's Alletra storage systems utilise NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) technology, providing high-speed data access and low latency for demanding applications.

HPE DL360 servers: These enterprise-class servers offer a balance of performance, efficiency, and security for a wide range of workloads.

The above combination of technologies aims to ensure strong performance and scalability for MRC over the next five years.

"Onel's strategy has ensured that we are well-prepared to meet capacity and performance requirements for the next five years. Their expertise has built us a strong and sustainable IT environment we can trust," VJ Borgohain, general manager of technology at Melbourne Racing Club, said.

Key technical outcomes of the project include resource consolidation with the new infrastructure allows for more efficient use of computing and storage resources.

MRC also gained data replication optimisation with improved replication processes that have contributed to cost savings and enhanced data protection.

Zero downtime has been achieved, with 100 per cent uptime with the new MRC solution, compared to five scheduled downtimes in the previous six months.

The solution's automation capabilities have eliminated the need for manual intervention, reducing the IT team's out-of-hours work.