Racing towards the cloud: an interview with Caterham head of group IT Bill Peters

Caterham Group head of IT Bill Peters tells Danny Palmer about his cloud-focused IT strategy, why he ditched BlackBerry and how Dell helped get the most recent addition to the F1 grid off the ground

When your job involves managing IT for both a sports car manufacturer and a Formula 1 team, no day is ever going to be the same.

"One day I'll be working on the ERP system for the automotive side of the business, then the next day I'll be looking at the supercomputing ability for the Formula 1 team," Bill Peters, head of group IT at Caterham Group told Computing. "Whilst at the same time keeping an eye on innovations that could give us some competitive advantage."

A key area for that innovation is data analytics and Peters, who prior to joining Caterham worked at another F1 team, described how the sport has been dealing with big data since long before it became fashionable.

"In Formula 1 we've actually been doing big data since before it was called big data and we've been doing it for a long while. We're capturing a lot of telemetry, simulation and analysis data and processing that," he said, going on to describe how the team is always examining how it can improve data analysis.

"We're now looking at tools to better enable that going forward so we can get more of a holistic view of all the information we're capturing. Whether that's data coming off the cars on a race weekend, simulators, television footage, it's about bringing that all together and gathering the big picture."

Naturally, all of that data needs to be stored and processed somewhere and Caterham has employed "a very heavily virtualised environment", for this, with Peters describing how the team "set out from the get-go to virtualise our enterprise and trackside systems."

"My ambition is to be the first team to have our trackside systems in the cloud, so we're planning progression towards that," he explained.

For Caterham - and the 10 other Formula 1 teams - setting up a garage on a far-flung race circuit involves a lot of logistical effort, but because the outfit has virtualised much of its trackside environment, it's made this process quicker and cheaper.

"Typically, teams still carry four or five racks full of IT equipment to every event. We've managed to condense that down to a half-size rack with a completely virtualised environment," said Peters.

"The significance of that is we save a huge amount of money in terms of shifting this kit around the world. Ultimately, we'd like to not carry anything other than the tablets and we're gradually moving towards that situation."

However, hardware isn't totally disappearing from Caterham's plans, with devices ranging from laptops to tablets to supercomputers all required for the team's activities. When Caterham was founded, it needed to do what Peters described as a "quick and dirty" tendering process to ensure the team was ready to compete at the first race of the season.

The importance of being able to quickly establish the entire IT infrastructure from scratch was a key selection criterion, which is why Caterham selected Dell and continues the relationship to this day.

"We had a lot to do in not a lot of time so we wanted to have as few vendors as possible and Dell practically ticked off every area of the schematic, which was a very pleasant surprise," said Peters, who cited technical fit, cost and "a commitment to being able to deliver" as reasons for selection.

"If they didn't deliver on time, there would be penalties because if we as a team didn't make the grid in March we would have suffered millions of pounds for not being there, so Dell put their money where their mouth is."

Peters told Computing how Caterham's Dell hardware is "standard off-the-shelf kit" and that he's particularly impressed with the Venue hybrid tablets, which he rolled out this year.

"We've finally got a product from Dell that is usable for us as a trackside product; they're fully-fledged Windows PCs in a tablet, which is what we've been looking for. Because to be useful for us we've got to be able to run bespoke applications and with iPads we just couldn't do that," he said, noting the lightweight tablets make life easier for engineers who are constantly on the move.

"Previously guys had to lug around chunky laptops to have the horsepower they need to run our bespoke applications. Now they've got much more lightweight devices," he said, adding "there's definitely a shift towards the tablets."

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Racing towards the cloud: an interview with Caterham head of group IT Bill Peters

Caterham Group head of IT Bill Peters tells Danny Palmer about his cloud-focused IT strategy, why he ditched BlackBerry and how Dell helped get the most recent addition to the F1 grid off the ground

Caterham also harnesses smartphones as productivity tools, with the team recently shifting from a BlackBerry-based mobile strategy to one that sees staff provided with iPhones instead.

"We recently moved away from BlackBerry for obvious reasons," said Peters, citing BlackBerry's recent struggle in the handset market.

"So we're primarily on iPhones at the moment because it gives us the most secure mobile platform," he continued, adding that Google Android wasn't selected because the OS is "inherently insecure because there's a huge amount of variation in terms of the versions that are out there".

Peters also described how Caterham trialled Z10 and Q10 smartphones - the devices BlackBerry was relying on to re-establish itself as a smartphone manufacturer - but was unimpressed.

"We did implement a trial with BB10 with Q10s and Z10s. I'll say nothing about the Z10s because they just didn't work. However, the Q10s, we still have some out there but there are issues around them," he said, before suggesting lack of MDM support for BlackBerry is also an issue.

"The problem is the mobile device management tool, BES10, isn't as good as other alternatives, so you can't manage those devices as well and the MDM suppliers aren't even bothering to develop for it, so it's difficult to manage," Peters said, before touching on Microsoft smartphones.

"We're keen to see what happens with the latest Windows phones. I think Windows has got a huge opportunity to become the device of choice if it's properly secured."

Ultimately, Peters told Computing, mobile and cloud converges into one strategy which forms the basis of how he wants IT within Caterham to move forward.

"We had a significant refresh in 2013 and we've been moving more towards mobile devices and converged infrastructure. That's a stepping stone to ultimately starting to put our services in the cloud," he said, describing cloud-based email as "invaluable", especially when maintenance or issues have taken factory servers offline.

Looking forward to Caterham's next high performance computing (HPC) upgrade, Peters suggested that by 2016, that sort of advanced software could also be run in the cloud.

"The next HPC refresh in two years, I think the cost point will be there and for that sort of environment, every piece of computer power is used. So we need to make sure any cloud provider can provide the stack we need to run that specialist software," he said.

Peters pointed out how Formula 1 "is probably even more concerned about security than other businesses" and "inherently competitive and distrustful", so security of cloud-based software "is very much in the back of our mind".

However, when it comes to the crunch, Peters told Computing he'd rather be able to access the data at any time than store it behind layers of security.

"There's less concern about hosting our environments in someone else's data centre and whether the security is there than there is being able to connect to that data centre. It's having the connectivity to the cloud-based solutions and having some sort of backup if you lose a connection, that's more a concern for us at this moment in time," he said.

Nonetheless, Peters described how his IT staff were initially sceptical about cloud, but now it's accepted as more of an enabler than a threat, because it allows employees to focus on more important tasks than merely maintaining servers, tasks which could play a part in helping the team improve on track.

"The guys who work for me were quite sceptical about it, they obviously had concerns about it, about what it'd mean for their jobs. If they're looking after an in-house solution at the moment, they see that as their role," said Peters.

"But I very much see it as commoditising the administrative side of things and allowing my guys to focus on where I need to focus, which is applications and tools. I think it's just a shift in emphasis," he concluded.