OL environmental commitment HPE tech way

Article posted by Coliseum, February 24^th, 2023

Image: Populous

The information technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on February 21^st that the OL Groupe – leading player in the entertainment and sports sector in France – has selected the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform to modernize its entire on-premises infrastructure. The HPE solution enables OL Groupe to increase its agility to deploy information technology (IT) resources, reduce its environmental footprint and accelerate the development of its new entertainment offerings to its millions of fans worldwide.

‘yahoo!finance’ stated that the OL Group owns the French professional football club Olympique Lyonnais and operates its own stadium, the Groupama Stadium, located in Décines-Charpieu (France), 365 days a year. The group operates in many domains such as soccer and other major sports events and entertainment. The group needed to evolve its technology environment and meet the very strong requirements of these activities in terms of availability, agility, security, resilience, and profitability.

Spring, Texas (US)-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global company behind the world’s leading edge-to-cloud platform as a service, which helps organizations accelerate business by harnessing the value of all their data, wherever it resides. Building on decades of rethinking the future and innovating to advance the way one lives and works, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology-as-a-service solutions spanning compute, storage, software, intelligent edge, high-performance computing, and mission-critical solutions. With a consistent experience across all cloud and edge environments, HPE solutions and services enable customers to develop new business models and modes of engagement and improve operational performance.

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Olympique Lyonnais, commonly referred to as simply Lyon or OL, is a men and women’s French professional football club based in Lyon in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (France). The men play in France’s highest football division, Ligue 1.

Parc Olympique Lyonnais, known for sponsorship reasons as the Groupama Stadium, is a 59,186-seat stadium in Décines-Charpieu, in the Lyon Metropolis (France). The home of French football club Olympique Lyonnais, it replaced their previous stadium, the 25,000-capacity Stade de Gerland in Lyon, in January 2016.

Organized around Olympique Lyonnais, a soccer club founded in 1950 and chaired by Jean-Michel Aulas since 1987, the OL Groupe is a leading player in the entertainment and sports sector in France. The Olympique Lyonnais has won 53 titles, including 32 with the women’s team (15 French Championships, nine French Cups and eight Union of European Football Associations [UEFA] Women’s Champions League) and 21 (including a record seven consecutive L1 titles) with the men’s team, which participated in its 24ème European cups this season.

Since the inauguration of its new stadium in January 2016, Olympique Lyonnais, like the biggest European clubs, has had a 100 percent private, ultra-modern and multifunctional stadium, open 365 days a year, which is part of a global strategy, offering entertainment activities in the sports, artistic, cultural, and corporate fields. In addition to the stadium, a project to build a new 16,000-seat arena on the OL Vallée site in Décines-Charpieu, which will host concerts and sports activities, is currently underway for delivery in late 2023.

The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform enables customers to accelerate data-first modernization and provides cloud services that can run on-premises, at the edge, in a colocation facility, and in the public cloud. In its final fiscal quarter of 2022, HPE reported Annualized Revenue Run-Rate (ARR) of $936 million with total as-a-service orders growth of 33 percent compared to the prior-year period.

HPE GreenLake has 65,000 customers, powers more than two million connected devices and manages more than one exabyte of data under management with customers worldwide. These organizations benefit from one control plane from which to automate, orchestrate and run their hybrid cloud strategy. The scalable, pay-as-you go HPE GreenLake platform also delivers robust security, compliance and control, and supports a broad partner ecosystem – including channel partners, distributors, independent software vendors, public cloud providers, service providers, and system integrators.

Flexible Architecture

‘yahoo!finance’ further stated that as part of the renewal of its equipment, OL Groupe called on HPE and its partner CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY to provide integration and managed services, as well as to design and deploy a modern and resilient on-premises technology platform, distributed over two data centers hosted within the Groupama Stadium, in order to respond to the rapid development of new services, while allowing better cost management.

This new platform, delivered on a pay-per-use basis with HPE GreenLake and managed from a single cloud interface, leverages HPE Alletra cloud-native data infrastructure and HPE ProLiant high-performance general-purpose servers.

France-based CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY is a specialist in secure IT infrastructures and is one of the leaders in Cloud Computing in France. Organized in four Divisions, Cloud and Managed Services, Infrastructure, Network-Security and Unified Communications, and Technological Modernization, Cheops Technology has obtained the highest expertise labels delivered by the major players of the IT market. With its 600 employees and its 13 agencies in France, CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY ensures the performance and availability of one’s information system and guarantees a real proximity relationship.

The main missions of this new software-defined platform are to:

Ensure business continuity 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, via a rapid disaster recovery solution running on two separate data centers and capable of providing greater resiliency, including HPE data protection solutions and HPE StoreOnce backup appliances that support all stadium data streams;
Improve visitor safety in the stadium, with expanded computing and storage capabilities for better management of video surveillance devices and higher image definition;
Improve performance, to support the development of OL Groupe activities and the multiplication of public events, concerts, sports, and esports competitions, especially during the operation phase of the future 16,000-capacity LDLC Arena, owned by the OL Groupe, by the end of 2023; and
Control its environmental impact by using an efficient and flexible on-premises technology platform to avoid over-provisioning while cutting energy costs in half.

Addressing environmental issues through technology

As the first French League 1 soccer club to be awarded a label certifying its action for the preservation of the environment, Olympique Lyonnais reaffirms its commitment to the environmental cause by choosing the HPE GreenLake solution. This solution has enabled the OL Groupe to reduce the energy cost of its IT structure by nearly 50 percent and is helping it to achieve its bold objective of reducing its energy footprint by 20 percent each year.

Specifically, the new HPE infrastructure and services delivered by CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY have enabled the group to increase its computing capacity fourfold and improve its storage, all while reducing the demand on resources to power and cool it and ensuring that additional capacity is always available.

Remarked Emmanuelle Sarrabay, Deputy Director General for Finance and Information Systems and Corporate Legal Affairs, OL Groupe, “The continuation of our collaboration with HPE allows us to fully enter the concrete phase of our energy efficiency plan, with the objective of reducing our energy consumption by 20 percent while guaranteeing the continuation of our sports and entertainment activities. The challenge is to deliver the best service and an optimized fan experience and we have full confidence in HPE’s teams to help us achieve our goals with their expertise.”

Averred Alain Melon, General Manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in France, “We are very proud of the choice made by Olympique Lyonnais to modernize its technology environment and commit to the environment with HPE technologies. Our HPE GreenLake platform provides Olympique Lyonnais with a scalable and flexible infrastructure capable of meeting the group’s future technology needs to continue to deliver an exceptional experience to its fans and visitors.”

CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY, a longtime Platinum Partner of HPE and Olympique Lyonnais, brought its expertise and experience to enable a seamless installation of the infrastructure and continues its collaboration with future projects, such as the LDLC Arena, a 16,000 seat event venue owned by the OL Groupe that will open in the last quarter of 2023.

Enthused Claude Fournier, Regional Director of CHEOPS TECHNOLOGY, “We are delighted to continue the adventure with Olympique Lyonnais alongside HPE. In 2015, when we implemented the previous infrastructure, the qualities sought were mainly performance, resilience and security. During this renewal, we added a strong criterion on the environmental impact. The gains obtained are in line with the objectives of our service centers which continue to ensure the daily remote operation of this new architecture.”

The LDLC Arena will be the largest indoor arena in France outside Paris and one of the most technologically and environmentally advanced in Europe.

The multi-purpose venue represents the latest stage in Olympique Lyonnais Groupe’s ‘OL Valley’ venture, which will see the development of the area surrounding the Groupama Stadium into a thriving cultural and leisure destination for the wider region.

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