A tenth of a second can determine a win or loss in Formula One (F1), making agility and speed of decision-making of utmost importance to race teams.
This is why the McLaren Formula 1 Team is leveraging VMware multi-cloud solutions to freely and flexibly manage, connect, protect, and deliver the cloud-based apps and workloads their teams rely on, wherever they are, at race speed.
For instance, the team uses VMware SD-WAN to utilise bonded networks and smart traffic shaping to deliver reliable connectivity at the extreme edge, such as the trackside on race weekends.
The team also runs apps in their own data centres, in the public cloud, and at the edge. With VMware’s multi-cloud solutions, they will be able to better understand, optimise, and secure their cloud footprint today while architecting their environment for the future to meet the rapidly changing demands of a team operating at the cutting edge of technology.
“[For every race,] the 300 sensors on each car produce 1.5TB worth of information. [Instead of manually analysing that large volume of data,] our race teams rely on machine learning to do lots of analysis and simulations. That’s how they can get the right information at the right time to enable decision-making, some of which needs to be done in as little as three seconds,” Ed Green, head of commercial technology at McLaren Racing, shares at a fireside chat on the side of the VMware Explore event in San Francisco on Tuesday (August 30).
He continues: “We have to embrace this idea of human in the loop and let tools [like machine learning] feed you with the right information. So when the safety car comes out during a race, our race engineers have a three-second window to look at the simulations and possible decisions with percentage opportunities produced by machine learning and then execute that [the best course of action].
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“Just milliseconds can make the difference between finishing first and pulling in second place, so everything we do is about marginal gains and trying to find ways to go faster.”
Moreover, McLaren Racing is using VMware Anywhere Workspace to deliver a seamless user experience to team members as they access apps from multiple devices at base and on the trackside during race weekends. This, combined with zero-touch device provisioning, will enable IT to support its global team while gaining full visibility of both device performance and user experience.
“By running VMware Workspace ONE on 200 Android tablets in the garage and the Android phones in people's pockets, we can provide secure access right to the edge. So the race engineers can look at trackside data on their phones in a secure way,” says Green.
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He believes the partnership with VMware can help support the company’s sustainability goals too.
“I think sustainability is more than just about reducing carbon emissions – [it should also include] how to be as efficient with the resources you've got, rather than trying to consume more. So saving CPU cycles or trying to be more efficient with data processing units delivered [through VMware can help],” he says.
“[Besides that,] there's so much untapped data inside VMware toolsets. [For instance,] our sustainability director came to me and asked how can we figure out where everyone's travelling to in the world [to find out our carbon footprint]. “
Green and his team initially thought of getting employees to fill up forms or using OCR (optical character recognition) to read plane tickets. But it later occurred to him that he could use the data on where employees securely access their emails to find out their carbon footprint.
“Using VMware Workspace ONE, I can see an employee accessing his emails at 5pm from San Francisco and [then doing the same from] London a few hours later or the next day. I can use [that information] to determine where he's been in the world, how he has travelled between point A and B, and work out the mileage,” he explains.
He adds: “Within any organisation, IT has such a pivotal role to play in exposing the existing data to help the business make better decisions. So I definitely encourage organisations to look across their stack, talk to their teams and see what else they can do with data they never thought they'd use. You'd always look at IT from security or user experience angles, but IT is important for teams looking at sustainability as well.”
