Magellan Robotech ups game for managing hybrid clouds to exceed customer demand

With HPE OneSphere, Magellan can on-board private cloud resources and provide a cloud-like experience to its users

The rapid growth of e-sports and online platforms is changing the gambling landscape across the globe. The market is developing so rapidly that bookmakers need to be able to offer the latest products or risk losing customers to their competition. Magellan Robotech, one of Europe’s leading developers of customized gaming platforms and services, must be able to get new products to market quickly to stay ahead in a very competitive landscape.

Magellan Robotech was founded in 2014 by the Stanleybet Group, an international bookmaker with over 60 years of experience in the Gaming business, with the aim of exploring new frontiers in gaming and entertainment. They are well known for developing innovative V-Sports, V-Games, casino products and online retail platforms, with end-users experiencing highly sophisticated digital video streams of games and virtual sports. They have a team of more than 150 professionals dedicated to creating bespoke products and services, customized for the needs of every single client.

The problem: How to respond fast enough to market demand for new applications and services?

The gambling industry is hugely competitive and Magellan Robotech’s customers are reliant on the company to provide them with the latest innovative gaming products that constantly push the boundaries for virtual gaming. To bring new products to market increasingly faster, Magellan Robotech must be able to provision resources quickly when opportunities arise to develop new gaming services and applications for the market.

Previously Magellan Robotech’s test and development systems were housed in legacy data center infrastructure, but they faced constant bottlenecks due to challenges with scalability and agility. They needed to move from legacy waterfall methodologies into a DevOps environment. According to Graham Banner, Head of IT Operations at Magellan Robotech, “We wanted to enable the developers to be able to iterative test, quickly deploy applications, and tear them down and bring them back up again, without a roadblock from the infrastructure team who had a ticket system. This meant developers could wait five days to get hold of services."

The solution: streamline access to multi-cloud resources

The solution was the HPE OneSphere, an as-a-service hybrid cloud management platform. Through a unified view in HPE OneSphere the team at Magellan Robotech can build hybrid clouds capable of supporting both traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native applications, while providing company executives the cost insights they need to make informed business decisions on their cloud utilization. HPE OneSphere equips Magellan’s developers with application provisioning as-a-service, so that they can focus on creating the industry’s leading virtual gaming software.

Getting HPE OneSphere up and running is rapid due to its as-a-Service delivery model. “Within minutes of deploying HPE OneSphere it had automatically discovered our cloud estate. It provided us insights straight away into our environment. We could see how much resources were being consumed, which teams were running them, and how much capacity they needed”, says Banner.

It has been a hugely empowering tool for Magellan Robotech’s IT team. According to Banner, “HPE OneSphere supports our legacy application stack, the current application stack and our future application stack and it’s a bridge between all these environments across our estate.”

Our experts say about HP Certification Exams

The edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven enterprise of the future - HP Certifications

HPE’s unique strategy brings edge, cloud, intelligent storage, and financial solutions together to create the innovative enterprise helping shape the future.

As digital transformation continues to disrupt every industry in every corner of the globe, the next phase of this evolution is upon us. Now data creation happens more at the edge, the retention of data is more important than ever before, less data is wasted, and the pace of innovation increases  in all industries, from healthcare to agriculture. That’s why our strategy is to accelerate your enterprise from edge to cloud, helping you connect all of your data, all of your edges, all of your clouds — everywhere.

Each of you is on a data transformation journey. And in most cases, the goal is to gain speed and agility so you can focus on accelerating innovation. We have created HPE to uniquely address the three biggest areas that could be slowing you down — transformation of your technology, transformation of your people and processes, and transformation of your economics.

Today, 75% of data is created at the edge, but 94% of that data is untapped or lost. This data waste is a missed opportunity and lost value. HPE knows the value of data and the insight it can give us, and that’s why have announced our commitment to invest $4 billion in the Intelligent Edge over the next four years. This will accelerate our ability to innovate like never before, developing technologies to enable real-time insights, personalized experiences, and instant action. Realtime, real data, real insights, real value.

We’ve started at the edge because it is increasingly here that business — and life — takes place. The edge is all about using technology and data to redefine the experiences and business outcomes you deliver to your end customers, making them more satisfied and loyal. For your employees, the edge helps them to be more productive and engaged, whether they are in an office, oil rig, or university. These benefits can be created for smart vehicles, as well as huge sports stadiums. We’re proud of our achievements transforming the new home of the Golden State Warriors — the Chase Center — and the Tottenham Hotspur football stadium into showcases for technology and connectivity. You can see the edge in action for yourself; in the Transformation Showcase at Discover Madrid. There, we’ll bring a factory floor to life to reveal the wonders of life on the edge. 

And in the cloud. The cloud facilitates compute at the edge which enables the speed necessary for insights to be found in the never-ending stream of data. What do innovators, creators, developers, designers and data scientists love about the cloud? Speed, agility, and lack of ramp-up time; indeed, the cloud keeps everything at their fingertips.

We believe that the cloud experience should be open and seamless across all your clouds, public, private, on premise and off premise. Further, we believe the best cloud partner is one who is unbiased and without an agenda. At HPE, the cloud is an experience, not a destination. It is by engaging edge to cloud that new opportunities can be created. That’s why we have also made a commitment to Hybrid IT, as we announced earlier this year.

HPE is in a unique position to accelerate any cloud strategy and deployment, through HPE Pointnext. Along with our recent acquisitions, HPE Pointnext means customers should Fear No Cloud. Wherever your apps and data are in the data center, across multiple clouds, or at the many edges of your enterprise, you’ll find HPE there, too, innovating to help you and your people be successful. Indeed, enterprises must now create and deliver services across  multi-cloud environments in a hybrid reality. This can present challenges for people and processes, economics and technology, but our expertise and solutions accelerate cloud transformation to help enterprises get hybrid cloud right — while avoiding the million dollar mistakes of others.

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The next generation of storage – storage class memory (SCM) and HPE’s Memory-Driven Flash

You may have heard about storage class memory (SCM), a new persistent tier in the memory/storage hierarchy that sits (roughly) between DRAM and NAND flash in terms of performance, capacity and cost. Evolving storage workloads, including next generation applications that leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and real-time analytics, are driving the need for a performance tier beyond what today's all flash arrays can offer. Evolving storage workloads, including next generation applications that leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and real-time analytics, are driving the need for a performance tier beyond what today's all flash arrays can offer. SCM technology will enable a new, high performance persistent storage tier that is needed to address the increasingly stringent performance requirements of many new workloads enterprises need to support as part of digital transformation. HPE has now partnered with Intel to bring SCM technology to their proven enterprise storage platforms, HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage. HPE has now partnered with Intel to bring SCM technology to their proven enterprise storage platforms, HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage.

Which Workloads Benefit From SCM?

Workloads where lower latencies drive improved business results are driving many early SCM deployments. Transactional databases that drive revenues in industries like financial services and e-commerce are a prime candidate for SCM, with stock exchanges being among the early adopters. Real-time analytics workloads driving time-sensitive results for on-line ad placement, customized offer presentations to in-store shoppers, and promotions tied to discrete events (e.g. a World Cup soccer match, an Olympic swim meet, etc.) that key off of social media profiles with location dependencies are other use cases where IDC has seen SCM deployed to drive faster results. Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based inference engines that must comb through massive constantly changing data sets to drive real-time recommendations are another key area, and the large growth of these types of workloads across virtually all industries going forward will drive SCM revenues. The sheer performance of this new class of storage will enable many types of workloads that were not even feasible just two years ago.

Consolidate and Simplify Infrastructure with Predictable and Consistent Performance at Scale

As part of infrastructure modernization efforts, many customers are looking to make better use of their IT budget. One of the strategies CIOs often use is the consolidation of storage workloads onto fewer platforms. Enterprise-class storage platforms offer a full suite of storage management features that help to make denser consolidation easier, but there are performance concerns as well: IT managers must continue to be able to meet service-level agreements they've made to their customers even as they increase workload density on a single platform. Denser consolidation, when feasible, results in fewer systems to manage and maintain, reduces administrative complexity, uses datacenter floor space more efficiently (making more room for growth), and generally improves TCO. With its high-performance characteristics, SCM delivers more predictably consistent response times at higher workload densities even as it lowers latencies. As enterprises look to further consolidate workloads, SCM will play an important enabling role.

HPE an Early Entrant in the Memory-Driven Storage Space

The coupling of SCM with proven enterprise storage platforms like HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage will be the preferred deployment model for this use case. HPE's recent HPE Memory-Driven Flash announcement allows customers to non-disruptively upgrade existing arrays with an Intel Optane solid-state disk-based caching tier, providing the performance needed for the most demanding workloads while at the same time enabling denser workload consolidation. HPE worked closely with Intel to create an optimized, enterprise shared storage solution for HPE Memory-Driven Flash:

"Since previewing SCM in 2016, HPE has collaborated with Intel to make Intel Optane technology ready for the enterprise," said Bill Leszinske, Corporate Vice-President of Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Group.  "I'm excited that HPE is delivering this new enterprise storage solution. HPE Storage, with Intel Optane technology, is leading a fundamental shift in storage architecture that will drive the next generation of innovation."

As they are among the first-movers to combine SCM performance with true enterprise-class capabilities, they are instrumental in driving this market forward and opening up additional opportunities for operational efficiencies with denser workload consolidation.

What Enterprises Most Want from SCM Are Predictably Consistent Low Latencies 

This past summer, IDC did primary research that explored customer perceptions of and experience with SCM, generating some interesting findings. SCM requires NVMe, a new storage protocol that leverages the performance and capacity of memory-based media like flash and SCM much better than SCSI (a protocol which was developed specifically for hard disk drives).  Awareness of SCM is very high among NVMe users, and 95.0% of the NVMe users surveyed worldwide were somewhat or very interested in testing SCM. Performance is clearly the driving factor, with customers looking to it to provide more predictably consistent low latencies under load as well as higher throughput and bandwidth. Survey respondents confirmed that the workloads they will be targeting for SCM deployment include in-memory databases, real-time analytics, and more technically-oriented computing for business (e.g. genomics in healthcare, seismic processing in oil and gas, modeling and simulation for design purposes in various industries, etc.). The survey confirmed that it is early in the growth of the SCM market, but that it will evolve quickly over the next two years. 15.7% of survey respondents expected to be testing SCM by the end of 2018, and 62.1% expect to be testing it by the end of 2019.

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HP Multifunction Printer Named 2018 “Product of the Year” by CRN

HP Award-Winning A3 MFPs Powering City of Arlington, Texas Forward

HP’s award-winning A3 MFPs provide customers a spectrum of powerful tools and cost savings across both PageWide and LaserJet choices. Together with managed print services (MPS), HP’s A3 MFPs anticipate problems, schedule maintenance, and ensure that printers are consistently up and running.

Take the City of Arlington, Texas, who partnered with ImageNet to improve efficiency and reduce costs among its network of 900 aging printers and copiers with a MPS program. Security, standardization, and ease-of-use were essential for the new fleet. At the recommendation of ImageNet, Arlington upgraded most of its devices to next-generation HP A3 MFPs designed for MPS and high-volume printing. The City also upgraded legacy A4 devices with HP LaserJet Managed MFP and HP LaserJet Pro printers.

“All the printers in the refreshed fleet are simplified and customized now,” said Darrell Strange, Knowledge Services Supervisor for the City of Arlington. “It’s a great improvement. With HP A3 printers, you just push a button and it works.”

The HP MPS solution is successfully providing the City of Arlington:

• Faster print and scan speeds and HP FutureSmart firmware to maximize productivity and uptime
• Cloud-based remote management with HP Smart Device Services and HP Web Jetadmin
• 18% projected reduction in color print volume with HP Color Access Control
• Printer-embedded security features including whitelisting, encryption, and authentication

CRN “Product of the Year” Methodology

First, the top five finalists are carefully selected by CRN editors in each of the 22 different product categories. Then, solution providers consider a number of factors when determining their ratings including but not limited to product quality and reliability; richness of product features and functionality; technical innovation; compatibility and ease of integration; and demonstrated ability to create new customer relationships or improve existing ones. This year’s survey garnered over 3,600 responses.