Olympique Lyonnais Groupe Selects HPE GreenLake with Partner Cheops

• HPE’s solution cuts the energy footprint of OL Groupe’s data centers in half and helps it meet its energy efficiency commitments to reduce its power consumption by 20% each year.
• The solution based on HPE ProLiant and HPE Alletra multiplies by 4 the performance of the data center hosted in the Groupama Stadium, owned by OL Groupe.

Olympique Lyonnais Groupe SA (OL) 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 IT resources, reduce its environmental footprint and accelerate the development of its new entertainment offerings to its millions of fans WW.

The OL Group owns the Olympique Lyonnais professional soccer club 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 strong requirements of these activities in terms of availability, agility, security, resilience, and profitability.

Flexible architecture to meet the group’s new offers
As part of the renewal of its equipment, OL Groupe called on HPE and its partner Cheops Technology France SA to provide integration and managed services, as well as to design and deploy a modern and resilient on-premises technology platform, distributed over 2 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 GreenLake and managed from a single cloud interface, leverages Alletra cloud-native data infrastructure and ProLiant general-purpose servers.

Main missions of this software-defined platform are to:  

• Ensure BC 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, via a rapid DR solution running on 2 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 customers’s activities and the multiplication of public events, concerts, sports and esports competitions, especially during the operation phase of the future LDLC Arena, owned by OL Group, by the end of 2023.
• Control its environmental impact by using a 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 environment¹, OL Groupe reaffirms its commitment to the environmental cause by choosing the GreenLake solution. This solution has enabled the French group to reduce the energy cost of its IT structure by nearly 50% and is helping it to achieve its bold objective of reducing its energy footprint by 20% each year.

Specifically, the HPE infrastructure and services delivered by Cheops 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.

“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% while guaranteeing the continuation of our sports and entertainment activities,” said Emmanuelle Sarrabay, deputy director general for finance and information systems and corporate legal affairs. “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.“

“We are very proud of the choice made by Olympique Lyonnais to modernize its technology environment and commit to the environment with HPE technologies,” said Alain Melon, GM, HPE in France. “Our 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, a long-time Platinum Partner of HPE and Olympique Lyonnais, brought its expertise and experience to enable an installation of the infrastructure and continues its collaboration with future projects, such as the LDCL Arena, a 16,000-seat event venue owned by OL Groupe that will open in the last quarter of 2023.

“We are delighted to continue the adventure with Olympique Lyonnais alongside HPE,” said Claude Fournier, regional director, Cheops. “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.“

¹ According to a study published by the English association Sport Positive