About the Client
Melbourne Racing Club (MRC) began its journey over 135 years ago as the Victorian Amateur Turf Club. Today, MRC is a premier horse racing club in Australia, renowned for hosting the prestigious Caulfield Cup. The MRC operates and runs the racecourses at Caulfield, Mornington and Sportsbet Sandown.
The Club also owns 14 hotels and club venues under the Pegasus Leisure Group. About 2,000 staff are employed by the Club, peaking at around 2,500 during the Spring Carnival.
With its dedication to excellence, the MRC plays a pivotal role in the Australian horse racing scene.
The organisation’s IT infrastructure is centred around data centres at their Caulfield site, which recently underwent redevelopment. This project addresses the challenges posed
by their ageing hyperconverged infrastructure, which incurred high costs for support and maintenance renewal
The Project
Project overview
The project addresses the challenges posed by MRC’s aging hyperconverged infrastructure, which incurs excessive costs for support and maintenance renewal. After careful evaluation, it was considered more cost-effective and valuable to refresh the current infrastructure with a brand-new solution. The primary goal is to simplify and innovate, designing a solution that meets MRC’s current and future business needs. The new solution delivered improved performance, reliability and disaster recovery capabilities, while offering almost 30% savings compared to the current solution over five years.
MRC's Pain Points
Longer scheduled downtime due to the complexity of the current solution. Simplification and innovation were needed to gain the flexibility needed for operations.
There was a risk of data loss due to the complexity and limitations of the existing solution, which was unacceptable.
Longer Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), exceeding an hour and potentially up to 24 hours.
Onel's Solution
To tackle these obstacles, Onel depended on market leader HPE, striving to push the boundaries and be innovative to meet MRCs business requirements. The choice of the correct solution is a matter of horses for courses, ensuring the main result was achieved effectively.
Therefore, Onel proposed HPE dHCI (disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure), offering flexibility and scalability by separating compute and storage resources.
This solution, paired with the Stretched vSphere Cluster, enabled active-active operations and automated disaster recovery. Integration with MRC’s existing VMware vSphere, Network, and Veeam Data Protection systems streamlined workload management across the stretched cluster. Equipped with Alletra NVMe storage and HPE DL360 servers powered by Intel®, the solution ensured ample capacity and improved performance for the next five years. HPE InfoSight also provided proactive monitoring and autonomous issue resolution, supported by HPE’s 24x7 availability.
How Onel Worked with MRC
MRC carefully assessed various vendors and resellers before settling on Onel as their preferred partner. Onel’s strength lay in their understanding of MRC’s business and technical needs. Through detailed discussions, demos, and analysis, Onel displayed their expertise and dedication to crafting tailored solutions. Onel’s consultative approach ensured that the proposed solution aligned perfectly with MRC’s objectives, operational nuances, and long-term goals.
Recognising MRC’s concern about ease of management, Onel implemented a project management strategy that aimed to alleviate any added burden on the IT team. They ensured a smooth onboarding process for the solution, allowing MRC’s team to transition effortlessly. Onel also provided education and training to MRC’s team members, enabling them to confidently run the new system without the need for added upskilling or resources.
The Outcome and Benefits
Zero Downtime
Previously, MRC faced scheduled maintenance windows five times in six months, requiring extra IT team hours. However, with the new solution, MRC achieved zero downtime, saving valuable team hours as manual intervention became unnecessary.
Increase Resilience
The active-active stretched cluster architecture ensures uninterrupted operations, allowing MRC’s IT team to focus on strategic initiatives. This enhancement in resilience cuts single points of failure and ensures continuous data availability across MRC’s data centres.
Improved Flexibility
The solution allows MRC to scale resources and adapt to changing workload demands without
geographical constraints.
Cost Savings
By merging resources, optimising data replication, increasing scalability, and reducing maintenance of legacy systems, MRC has experienced less strain on their IT budget.
Simplified Operations
Unified management and automation capabilities streamline operations, reducing administrative overhead and enhancing overall IT efficiency.
What the Client Said
“ What stood out for us was Onel’s high-level design approach, which helped us
understand how the solution would work in our environment even before the project began”
VJ Borgohain, General Manager - Technology, Melbourne Racing Club
“Thanks to Onel’s strategy, we’re well prepared to meet our capacity and performance requirements for the next five years. Their expertise has built us a strong and sustainable IT environment that we’re confident in”
VJ Borgohain, General Manager - Technology, Melbourne Racing Club
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