Formula One (F1) racing team Toyota Motor Group (TMG) is aiming to cut data storage costs by 25 per cent with a redesign of its storage infrastructure.
The company will replace legacy servers with new systems incorporating intelligent data management software that will classify information more cost effectively.
TMG’s 100TB of data is growing by 50 per cent a year, which the company aims to reduce to 35 per cent through more efficient storage.
The Toyota F1 vehicle performance relies on accurate collection and storage of data. Sensors throughout the cars feed high volumes of performance data such as oil temperature and brake wear to trackside engineers for analysis.
Data is downloaded to local storage devices and transmitted to headquarters, where the availability of this data is essential to upgrading cars between races.
During an annual check of its storage environment, Toyota found it was over-delivering and therefore over-spending in parts of its storage capacity, specifically in disaster recovery, says Thomas Schiller, TMG’s general manager of IT systems.
‘We need to ensure data is easily found and available when needed,’ said Schiller.
‘You never know if data from a past race or trial may be the key to an engineering breakthrough,’ he said.
Rollout of the intelligent software provided by EMC has just started and will be completed by January 2007. The intelligent layer over the data storage system will lead to greater automation and less manual classification of data, saving costs.
‘When old data no longer needs the high-end capabilities of our more expensive equipment it will be archived on a tiered storage infrastructure,’ said Schiller.
He says the main challenge will be migrating data to the new system.
‘We have to ensure continuity of data availability so that our end users will not experience any disruption,’ said Schiller.
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