Case study · Major venue
Melbourne Racing Club.
An HPE dHCI upgrade, delivered with zero downtime.
MRC's ageing hyperconverged platform was costing more to maintain each year and forcing regular downtime on a site that runs live events. Onel replaced it with HPE dHCI and a stretched vSphere cluster, delivering active-active operation and automated disaster recovery.
Cutover
Zero downtime
No outage at migration
Before
5 maintenance windows
In the previous six months
Cost
Close to 30% saved
Over five years
Recovery
Automated DR
Active-active, two data centres
About the client
Melbourne Racing Club began over 135 years ago as the Victorian Amateur Turf Club. Today it is one of Australia's premier racing clubs and the host of the Caulfield Cup, operating the racecourses at Caulfield, Mornington and Sportsbet Sandown, and owning fourteen hotels and club venues through Pegasus Leisure Group.
Around 2,000 staff work for the Club, peaking near 2,500 during the Spring Carnival. Its IT infrastructure is centred on data centres at the recently redeveloped Caulfield site.
Sector
Major venue, events and hospitality
Sites
Caulfield, Mornington, Sportsbet Sandown
Platform
HPE dHCI with a stretched vSphere cluster
The challenge
Ageing infrastructure, rising renewal costs.
MRC's hyperconverged platform was reaching end of life and carrying excessive support and maintenance renewal costs. After evaluation, refreshing the infrastructure outright proved more cost-effective than renewing what was already there. Three problems drove the decision.
Longer scheduled downtime
The complexity of the existing platform meant five separate maintenance windows in six months, each one a planned interruption on a site that runs live events.
Risk of data loss
The limitations of the existing solution created a real risk of data loss, which the Club considered unacceptable.
RPO and RTO measured in hours
Recovery point and recovery time objectives exceeded an hour, and could reach 24 hours.
Onel's solution
Separate the compute from the storage.
Onel proposed HPE dHCI, disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure, which separates compute and storage so each can scale on its own. Paired with a stretched vSphere cluster, it enabled active-active operation across MRC's data centres and automated disaster recovery.
The platform integrated with MRC's existing VMware vSphere, network and Veeam Data Protection systems, so workload management stayed consistent across the stretched cluster. HPE Alletra NVMe storage and HPE DL360 servers gave capacity and performance headroom for five years, with HPE InfoSight providing proactive monitoring and autonomous issue resolution behind HPE's 24x7 support.
How we worked together
Chosen after a competitive assessment.
MRC assessed a number of vendors and resellers before selecting Onel. What separated us was understanding the business as well as the technical requirement: detailed discussions, demos and analysis, and a recommendation shaped around how the Club actually operates rather than around what we had to sell.
MRC's main concern was the management burden on its own IT team. Onel structured the project to avoid adding to it, ran the onboarding, and trained MRC's people to operate the platform themselves without new headcount or upskilling.
The outcome
What actually changed.
Zero downtime
Previously five maintenance windows in six months, each needing extra IT team hours. The new platform removed the manual intervention entirely.
Increased resilience
The active-active stretched cluster cuts single points of failure and keeps data continuously available across both data centres.
Improved flexibility
Resources scale to changing workload demand without geographical constraints.
Close to 30% saved
Over five years, against the cost of retaining and renewing the existing solution.
Simplified operations
Unified management and automation reduced administrative overhead across the environment.
Automated disaster recovery
Built into the platform rather than bolted on, with HPE InfoSight monitoring and 24x7 vendor support.
"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
In their words
Ninety seconds with the client.
1:46 · Melbourne Racing Club on the dHCI upgrade
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