Motorsport firm drives network upgrade

Prodrive builds cars to compete in the World Rally championship

Motorsport group Prodrive has completed a major network upgrade to help deliver new IP-based services across the company.

The firm, which runs the Subaru World Rally team and the Aston Martin Racing team, has installed a 10Gbit/s Ethernet infrastructure and power over Ethernet capability, supplied by Foundry Networks.

Prodrive wanted to increase bandwidth and introduce new network services such as voice over IP (VoIP), said head of IT Graham Brook.

“Our old infrastructure, while reliable, was already four years’ old, and starting to show the strain of increased traffic,” he said.

“We only had 100Mb/s connections to the desktop, a simple Layer 2 architecture, no Quality of Service and only twin gigabit links between the core switches. This project is all about preparing Prodrive for the future given the huge growth in IP-based traffic.”

The network covers a campus in Banbury, Oxfordshire including administrative offices and eight buildings where rally and racing cars are designed, manufactured and prepared for events. Dual-fibre links connect all the buildings to ensure resilience and maximum bandwidth.

Prodrive’s data traffic has grown exponentially in recent years and is expected to continue as files become bigger and more applications are added. Huge quantities of design, simulation and telemetry information is generated which needs to be shared around the campus network.

Designing and building racing cars is a data-intensive process, said Brook.

"We want to take advantage of having a high-performance network infrastructure, and the investment made in it, by layering on new applications like VoIP which we are in the process of doing. As we are a multinational business, clearly VoIP has many benefits in terms of collaborative and efficient working across sites through application sharing and video conferencing,” he said.

"The network is the unsung hero behind everything. I didn't want to wait to upgrade our network until we had a problem, since employees need their computers to do their jobs. And for me, this is the measure of the project's success. The new network is in, doing its job, adding the capacity we needed, and delivering exactly what we expected and wanted."