Formula One racing is about as intense as sporting competition gets. And running the business side of an F1 race team is just as competitive – especially since the introduction of F1 budgets caps in the 2021 season, and technical regulations on how car data is acquired and retained.
F1 is about using your resources as smartly as possible to win, a challenge that will be familiar to many cloud and managed service providers. How can edge cloud services help?
Sauber Motorsport AG saw Zadara Edge Cloud services, including its zStorage, as a way to simplify its environment, reduce costly downtime, recover faster from problems, and accelerate the data analytics applications that drive the team forward.
Zadara’s solution was a stretch cluster that provides multi-zone high availability (multi-zone HA) and faster application performance across the team’s two data centers in Hinwil, Switzerland. But the solution has also delivered commercial benefits, which could be as valuable to Zadara partners like you as they are to the F1 team.
Here are five ways partnering with Zadara is helping Sauber Motorsport’s F1 team to gain commercial advantages.
Stretch the cluster, not IT resources
Sauber runs two separate datacenters (DCs) at it Hinwil HQ, where the Formula One car is designed, tested, and continuously improved, and enterprise applications also run. But with Zadara, Sauber doesn’t have the management overhead you’d expect when running two DCs.
The flexibility of Zadara zStorage means there’s just one platform to manage and one pool of storage resources – file, object, and block. And the hardware is fully managed by Zadara, with 24/7/365 pro-active support. In a world where skilled IT people are increasingly hard to find and costly to hire, simplified fully-managed zStorage saves both time and money.
Averting disaster
Data center downtime is costly for any business. For an F1 team just before a race weekend, it could be disastrous.
Because the stretch cluster at Hinwil writes all data to arrays in both data centers simultaneously, it provides the ultimate in failover. The other data center simply picks up the slack in the event of a hardware fault. RPO is zero, so no data is lost. The team continues work as normal.
Real-time and historic data analytics
This high level of data protection is useful in data analytics and regulatory compliance. Today, F1 teams must archive all data so they can prove compliance with the competition’s strict technical regulations, should they be audited. Long-term data archives allow them to discover deeper engineering insights.
With Zadara, tiered storage makes archiving data very cost-effective. But the big advantage over public cloud is that Sauber can access their cold data whenever they need to, and use it in their analytics applications.
Flex capacity
Like many kinds of business, IT resource requirements at Sauber Motorsport are not constant. Demand might increase significantly going into a race weekend, and shrink outside of the F1 season.
With Zadara, the team always has enough storage capacity and performance – and it only pays the resources it uses at any given time. That’s thanks to our 100%-OpEx billing model, and the ability to scale flexibly up and down with spare on-site capacity. There’s no overprovisioning and no waiting weeks for hardware deliveries. Just efficient, cost-saving, enterprise infrastructure.
Call to action
The commercial advantages Sauber Motorsport gained from its multi-zone HA stretch cluster are available to all Zadara partners – and ideal for managed service providers looking for a competitive edge.
To learn more about how our partners are benefitting from multi-zone HA, and our partnership with Sauber Motorsport and its Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN, click below. You can also contact the Zadara team directly.
- Zadara Partner program
- Multi-zone high availability with Zadara
- Zadara and Alfa Romeo Racing F1 Team ORLEN
