G’day folks, it's Chris ‘Gonzo’ Gondek here. Coming to you live from the Australian Formula One Grand Prix 2023 in Melbourne. And I'm actually literally trackside with the Aston Martin Formula One team and I have a very special guest here with me, Ian Penny. And would you like to introduce yourself to our audience? Hi there, I'm Ian. I’m an IT Trackside Engineer with Aston Martin, and I've been with the team for seven years. Fantastic. Ian, as a trackside engineer, give us a bit of a rundown of your, kind of, day to day during--you know-- a day like this in prep and then on race day. So today, we arrive at the track at 8:30 this morning, make sure everything’s running okay in the garage, make sure all systems are good, everything’s healthy. Then we got ready for P1. So I'm guessing there's a lot of technology that you're working with and equipment andNetApp being a sponsor of Aston Martin. We have some NetApp equipment here on site, right? Yeah, it's true. We've got two NetApp FlexPods in the garage and it gives us some resiliency during the sessions. And we have a lot of bands that run on there. Okay. So virtual machines, yeah? And the NetApps, are these the All Flash FAS Arrays? Yeah, the AFF 250s I think they are So our top of the range, super fast and I guess, you know, fast cars need fast data. These are the fastest cars so I'm guessing the fastest data is really important. Can you tell us a little bit about how the telemetry from the cars makes its way to the NetApps? Yes, it comes back to the garage over RF frequency and it then comes through to the garage processed by our data servers on the FlexPods. We store some data there, and the engineers they can access live so they can see every bit of the cars they go round. So real time analytics coming from that fast storage it must be important, right? Formula One is measured in milliseconds. So I'm guessing some millisecond performance from your storage is really important, right? Yeah, it's absolutely vital. Without that, we could lose positions on the track. We can make the wrong call at pitstop. Yeah, it's vital that we have that really good data. So this is some of the impacts of a, I guess, interruption to the data performance, as you just mentioned, could make a,bad performance. Sorry, a bad decision on track. Yeah. And,lose you know, spots in the race. That sort of thing right? Yeah we could lose positions in the race and if it was really bad we'd have to stop the car. Stop the car altogether, yeah. But I'm guessing there's also an element of safety here, right? There's information around the car and how it's performing. In some of the races I've watched, the teams will tell the driver, “Stop, pull over and just get out because something seriously wrong.” Would that be some of the same data that you're collecting here as well? Yeah. So if we don't get that data, then we'd have to stop the car. But yeah, the data off the car is vital. That's a really good point that you just mentioned, that if you don't get the data, then you've got to stop the car because you don't know what's going on. And if the drive is compromised, Yeah, we don't have the car safe, therefore it's safer to stop the car. And so, you know, Formula One happens around the world at various different locations, different countries. Do you pack up this kit every two weeks, take it with you to the next location, unpack, rewire, restart? Yeah. So at the end of the race on Sunday, we’ll transfer all our data back to the UK. They will start shooting everything down, load up, put it on the plane, unpack it in next country. Awesome. And how do you ship your data back to the UK? Are you using any of the NetApp smarts? Are you SnapMirroring that data back? Yeah, we're trialing at the moment. It’s in our current factory, but the plan is to go live with all our data SnapMirrored when we go to our new facility That's really so that gives you not just all the telemetry data back to headquarters, but also kind of like a disaster recovery copy as well, right? Yeah, Not only the data. We have video feeds from the cars, from the sessions, all the reliability information. And this is all on the NetApp AFF 250s. Yeah, that's true. That’s amazing, that's fantastic. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about specific NetApp technology now. I was very lucky to have a bit of a garage tour and a pit tour and noticed that you have some redundancy in place. You've got a couple of NetApp side by side and you know, they have some inherent redundancy built into themselves, but you've also kind of got them in a highly available configuration. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. Because of how important the data is, it's a case of we can't just rely on one cluster. We need to have two.clusters side by side. Yeah. So the independently powered, independently networked and then they cross between each other. Fantastic. So if one fails, it’ll switch over to the other one. Yeah. We can carry on as normal. And one, I guess, instance of an AFF 250 is enough to service how many video feeds, teams, telemetry. This box is doing everything on the day, right? Yeah. So we have about 100 GB of data per race weekend. 100 GB per race weekend. Per car. And there's two cars obviously. Two cars. Over the weekend, we'll get about 200 GB of data and the AFF will deal with all that for us, as well as all the video recordings that we do. That's about 60GB per weekend. So, I know things don't always go perfectly. Have you ever had a situation where something has gone wrong and you've had to recover real quick? So far, thankfully, no. Oh, fantastic. Awesome. And so what about for a data protection perspective, you leveraging any of the snapshot technology inherent within NetApp and things like that? Yes, we've got storage, VM disaster recovery switched on. So we've got that for our files. Fantastic. Yep. Great feature that we're trying to create awareness around. So it's fantastic to see the AMF1®️ team using that. Yeah, sure. We got all that for all our critical data. So awesome. Fantastic. Can you tell me of an example of how you've used data and the analysis of the data that you create that's directly resulted in an innovation or a positive outcome or a decision during a race, or during the course development. So as the car is running, and we're looking at the data. It gives us the ability to make calls on when to stop the car, what sides to use, how the car's performing and how we should go from there. And this is all kind of live on the track. The data that you send back to HQ is that been further analyzed, further, you know, changes in development in the vehicle and things like that? Yeah. So as the data goes back to the UK between sessions, we have the simulator running, so they can try the data out there. Let's see how it works, try a change, see what impact that has and we try that next session. Fantastic. So I guess you could literally say your data driven as a Formula One team telemetry coming in from the cars you've got all the information surrounding the environment, the weather, the tires, you know, data heading back to headquarters in the further development of the car. And tell me a little bit about some, I guess, the communication systems. I mean, if the conversations that are happening with each other and the telemetry RF, does all of that get recorded as well once you know? Yeah, so we record that through the machine, it starts on the AFF and then we can listen back to it, we can review overnight, see what people say on the radio, make track calls based on what we're hearing, what we think they’re saying. Strategy calls off that. There's so much data being collected from so many different angles and strains, and it's super impressive to see that literally one All Flash FAS 250 can handle all of that. And you’ve got another one on standby just in case anything happens, and you're kind of active,on the day. But thanks so much for speaking with us today. Good luck on the track. Aston Martin having a crackin’ season so far. We'd like to think that we have a little bit to do with that with the tech behind the scenes. Ian, thank you so much for your time, and looking forward to catching up after the race. Thanks.very much.