RaceTrac has deployed Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) ProLiant servers at more than 800 of its gas service stations in the US.
The ProLiant servers can support workloads including bare metal and virtualized applications such as VDI, data analytics, AI, and machine learning.
The latest iteration of the server is the ProLiant Gen11, which offers up to two 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors up to 60C and PCIe Gen5 up to 10 slots and 2 OCP 3.0 slots.
The servers can be managed via the HPE iLO6 and the HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management.
The companies said the roll-out has improved RaceTrac's ability to provide self-pumping gas stations, credit card and payment processing, and customer loyalty program.
“The average time spent by a RaceTrac customer is approximately two and a half minutes, and our goal is to offer a frictionless experience during every visit,” said Tyler Grubbs, executive director of store systems and technologies, RaceTrac. “We chose HPE because they entered the trenches with our IT team to understand our needs and how to support our organization’s mission. In addition to making our customers’ experience simpler and more enjoyable, the new compute environment will enable us with capabilities to harness the power of data to make better business decisions.”
In addition to deploying the HPE servers on-site, RaceTrac is using the HPE Alletra Storage data infrastructure.
The compute and storage will also be used for improving store security and management, including camera surveillance, employee time cards, inventory order placements, and daily accounting summaries.
“HPE compute and storage solutions provide retailers a unique foundation to fuel seamless customer experiences and optimized operations,” said Neil MacDonald, executive vice president and general manager, of compute at HPE. “RaceTrac is a powerful example of a retail organization embracing data-first modernization to power new applications and drive better business outcomes. We had the pleasure of teaming up with RaceTrac to support them on this journey to unlock greater value for their customers and boost competitiveness.”
In the future, HPE and RaceTrac are also exploring fraud prevention and detection with video surveillance and analytics, as well as real-time tracking using computer vision.
HPE's revenue for fiscal year 2023 reached $29.1 billion. In its fourth-quarter results, released in November 2023 revenue for Intelligent Edge services was $1.4bn, compute contributed $2.6bn, and storage $1.1bn. The latter two segments were significantly down YoY.
