Openness Customer Spotlight: Microsoft Helps Aston Martin Solve Interoperability Challenges

Posted by Steve Lamb
Microsoft United Kingdom

With nearly a century of history, Aston Martin has developed into an automotive icon, a marque synonymous with luxury, heritage and authentic craftsmanship. All of their models are hand-crafted, using advanced technology processes within a very modern environment at the forefront of contemporary manufacturing.

Supporting the company’s entire operations, including locations in England, Germany, the United States, Japan, and China, is a sophisticated IT infrastructure. However, over time, this infrastructure had evolved into a heterogeneous platform of disparate operating systems and management tools.

“The 15-member infrastructure and operations staff worked hard to build interoperability into our systems and tools to optimize performance, speed, and agility, but it was a challenge,” says Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT Infrastructure Manager at Aston Martin. “The ‘consumerization’ of IT; cloud and hybrid computing complete with shifting networks; and the increasing mobility of our employees and their devices make it even more imperative that we have proper tools to manage and control the Aston Martin environment.”

To improve efficiency and simplify management of their mixed IT environment, Aston Martin chose the Windows Server 2012 operating system, which includes the latest version of Hyper-V virtualization technology, as well as Microsoft System Center 2012.

“The 2012 iteration of Microsoft products is a very, very strong portfolio. As a customer, the 2012 refresh year demonstrated Microsoft’s commitment to building interoperable products that just work seamlessly together,” said Roach-Rooke.

Since deploying their Microsoft solutions, Aston Martin’s server consolidation project is almost complete, with dozens of physical servers virtualized, including many proprietary applications that ran on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software.

“We knew that virtualization was the only way to move forward, but I wanted to standardize on a single virtualization technology that would serve all our needs, including running some of our SUSE Linux-based applications,” says Roach-Rooke.

For more on how Aston Martin’s interoperable solution improved efficiency across their operations, please check out the below video or the complete case study.