EMC gives Lotus F1 go-faster stripes as sport reins in technological excesses

Will virtualisation, a push into the cloud and a flirtation with big data give Lotus the edge it needs?

Formula One. It's either a legitimate sport in which the world's most talented drivers compete, or a technological arms race won only by whoever spends the most money on the fanciest car.

Whichever camp you belong to, the sport has introduced new regulations in 2014 to try to combat claims of excessive technological exploitation.

For Lotus F1 Team, fitting in with the new rules seemed a particularly daunting challenge, as IS and IT director Michael Taylor explained to Computing at EMC World 2014 in Las Vegas today.

"We realised quite early on that we were a long way out with technology from where we needed to be in terms of being very reactive to the business and having a very short cycle time," says Taylor.

When Lotus was coming to the end of a previous network and storage relationship with NetApp in 2013, Taylor describes how EMC soon "got wind" of the company's plans to make some hefty changes to its entire IT set-up.

It was a good job EMC was so interested as, explains Taylor, Lotus "just [doesn't] have time to go through a long tendering process - we need to identify the right technology, and the organisations that can provide that for us, and get it out there as fast as we can".

EMC's first remit was to "help transform IT across the board", says Taylor, "from factory to track sides, focusing totally on private cloud".

Taylor wished to move away from traditional infrastructure - what EMC calls the "second platform" - to enable a true use of IT as a service, and to "rapidly iterate and evolve to meet the lifecycle we have around the car, and react to the change in the organisation".

Taylor cannot emphasise enough how important the car is to the team's entire existence.

"The focus is around the car - everything is around the car, first and foremost," he says.

"Whatever we can do, from an IT perspective, must enable the car to be faster. That might be on track or in the design and manufacturing process.

"Aerodynamics obviously have a part to play, and a huge amount of investment is spent annually to develop the car. We were pretty much on a two-week lifecycle to design and manufacture the parts with iterative updates."

Communication between car and personnel is aimed to be at around a tenth of a second, for every race, in every season, with change coming thick and fast.

"The product that starts the season in the car, and finishes the season, is distinctly different to us," explains Taylor. "Pretty much everything on the car has been through a design or improvement process several times over."

EMC is in a privileged position, being able to offer a wealth of expertise across the board at Lotus. As has been the theme this week at EMC World 2014, with the firm pushing its "EMC Federation" message - a deft rebranding of the company's many arms, including VMware, Pivotal, and now flash storage start-up DSSD - the company now wishes to be all things to all people. Taylor is certainly impressed with the speed at which EMC began changing Lotus on many different levels.

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EMC gives Lotus F1 go-faster stripes as sport reins in technological excesses

Will virtualisation, a push into the cloud and a flirtation with big data give Lotus the edge it needs?

"We had a shortage of storage that started off as a data challenge, but it just started to evolve," explains Taylor.

"We decided converged infrastructure with EMC was the way to move forward. It made things very easy for us, and very simple - it was a quick turnaround of four weeks, and then we had a product ready to go and to start upgrades.

"A lot of EMC's converged infrastructure hinges around VMware, and the technology we already have in our data centres, and EMC were a one-stop shop who could give us that private cloud capability very, very quickly."

EMC soon had Lotus migrating away from its past fixed-server approach, moving instead into 100 per cent virtualised servers.

"We've got sub-divisions, sub-service and the ability to spin up services very quickly and efficiently, but also tear them down again just as efficiently," says Taylor.

Specifically, Taylor states that Lotus uses "a bit of everything" that EMC offers. With two data centres in the firm's campus in Enstone, Oxfordshire, virtualised storage software VPEX is employed to handle the data split across the premises, with VNX bringing the hardware. Cisco's Unified Computing System [UCS] complements this set-up for the compute space.

EMC is encouraging Lotus to move away from "the fixed server approach, going down the 100 per cent virtualised route", explains Taylor.

The cloud is now being used to "embrace data retention", says Taylor.

"It's providing a nice level of protection with the Atmos [EMC's big data management] solution as well. We've got just over a petabyte of usable storage in the cloud solution. We have back-up with Symantec, and data recovery and retention."

This way, Lotus can access instantly and at any time data going back as far as 90 days.

"It gives a complete replica of data to personnel in any location should they need it. The theory is, keep your hot data where it needs to be, and slowly archive away the colder data."

The amount of data collected is phenomenal. With 150 sensors on each car, 2,500 data sets are collected per lap, including thermal dynamics, cornering, telemetry, video, weather and GPS tracking.

"Every single thing we can, we capture and log for reference, using data in real time," Taylor says. The telemetry stream is continuous, he went on - the faster the processing, the better.

But new regulations mean this type of data capturing is strictly regulated: F1 is to be less about powerful computing, and more about creative IT within a carefully enforced framework.

"So now, technology helps us to find out that what we're testing in wind tunnels isn't a waste of our time, for example," offers Taylor.

With speed and accuracy paramount, it's no wonder that Taylor is taking a particular interest in EMC's main announcements this week around software-defined architecture, and what VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger today called a "tectonic shift" in IT, which he said would reduce costs on client and server while "simultaneously building into the cloud".

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EMC gives Lotus F1 go-faster stripes as sport reins in technological excesses

Will virtualisation, a push into the cloud and a flirtation with big data give Lotus the edge it needs?

"Status quo won't work here, and a new approach is required," Gelsinger boldly stated.

"Not just limiting ourselves to network or storage, is of definite interest to us," reflected Taylor.

"It gives us the agility to react very, very quickly to the ever-changing demands."

The ongoing development of Pivotal's big data PaaS [platform as a service] is also getting Taylor's attention.

"We're doing a lot around data and analytics. It's not necessarily big data, but it's dispersed data sets, and the correlation is interesting to us, so I think some of the stuff Pivotal is doing is now becoming more relevant to us as an organisation," he says.

"Once we move down that route, we have a vision of real-time analytics, where we're using real time data to build up knowledge and information, understanding it, and then using those as triggers in real time so we don't have to rely on engineers being able to see those things," he explains.

But the much-trumpeted EMC acquisition of flash storage start-up DSSD, as announced yesterday, isn't causing quite so much excitement in the Lotus camp.

"In terms of the acquisition announcement, it's not something that's on my radar, to be honest," admits Taylor. "It's interesting, and there seems to be a lot of crossover now with things like XtremIO [EMC's all-flash storage array].

"But I'm still a firm believer in server-side storage and reducing the latency, despite the fact people are all talking about flash now."

Lotus has a deal with EMC extending into 2016. Taylor admits, when challenged, that Lotus isn't one of the larger teams in F1. So was choosing EMC down to budget?

"It was less about cost, and more about ensuring costs don't run away with themselves during the process, as well as ROI," responds Taylor, somewhat cryptically.

"Our relationship with EMC is unique in some ways, in that some of the cost has been offset around marketing agreements. F1 is obviously a good place to showcase technology.

"Cost isn't something F1 teams like to share in any way, in case we can be perceived to be gaining an advantage," he warns.

But it's understandable, in these testing times, to agree to let an IT company stick its logo on your car if it'll help you survive.

"If you stand still in Formula One, you go backwards," says Taylor. "It's as simple as that. So we have to keep finding new ways to do things to reduce and improve the cycle time."

Keep an eye on this year's competition to see if Lotus' EMC-powered F1 car performs as planned.