F1 teams choose rival storage systems

Formula 1 rivals British American Racing (BAR) and Renault have chosen different network-attached storage (Nas) systems to store the design data used to build their cars.

F1 teams redesign 80 per cent of their cars during a season. The cars have 3,500 components and BAR designs some 10,000 over the course of the races, said David France, head of IT for the team.

BAR has installed BlueArc Nas, which has brought a sixfold improvement in save times and has maximised throughput for its computer-aided design (Cad) system, because data movement functionality is in the hardware.

By early 2002, BAR was running out of space for its Unigraphics Cad data.

"Data was on several servers, none with sufficient disk capacity for all of it, so there was lots of juggling," said France.

Back-up took too long, particularly when UK-based designers interacted with the team at the Japanese Grand Prix.

"Speed of access was a problem: some big Cad drawings took 10 minutes to load," he added.

For file-sharing, Nas was a natural choice. BAR evaluated Network Appliance (NetApp) products but opted for BlueArc because "it fitted into our architecture, had the performance, and the supplier was responsive", said France.

Renault, meanwhile, has moved from smaller to larger NetApp filers.

It already had a NetApp 7400 filer, which was almost full when it decided last year to switch from Unigraphics to rival Cad package Catia. But because of the larger files that this entailed, the decision was taken to renew storage.

Renault considered introducing nearline storage, to which less critical data could be hived off, or cutting the requirement that three years' data be kept live online.

Instead, however, it chose more Nas. Having evaluated five products the team opted for NetApp's FAS960 because it needed to scale to 6TB purely by adding disk, explained Graeme Hackland, IT manager of Renault F1.

The FAS960 interacted better with database software and loaded Cad diagrams 60 per cent faster than the previous infrastructure.

NetApp's 24x7 support was also important, said Hackland, as was its ability to move to a storage area network if required.