Williams puts data in pole position - an interview with CIO Graeme Hackland

After years of on-prem services and tape-based cold storage, Williams Racing is gearing up to compete with F1’s biggest names

From a self-confessed underinvestment in IT, to having three-quarters of critical apps in the cloud, Williams Racing F1 has evolved at pace since CIO Graeme Hackland joined in 2014. While the organisation will probably always use a hybrid model, the cloud has been a gamechanger.

The 2021 season marks the first new generation of F1 cars since Hackland joined Williams - although this will be his 24^th season in the sport overall. Continuing a long history of data-driven design, he says data will be "critical" to the new generation.

"Data will be everything, as always. 1979 was the first race-winning car for Sir Frank [Williams, team founder], and the first data-logger. It's been a long time that we've been capturing data in Formula 1 and using data for competitive advantage. So, data's critical for the next generation of cars."

Williams CIO Graeme Hackland

Williams collects information from many sources: as well as that provided by the regulator, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), it processes data from physical and virtual wind tunnels, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and thousands of simulations - all in an effort to design the perfect car.

"When we talk about data, people often think of the race car… [but] we, by far and away, generate the most data from aerodynamics. I can't provide [the team] with enough storage, so they have to flush data, actually - which is terrible, but they just generate so much data.

"We're running that wind tunnel in an eight-week cycle, and CFD all the time, so it's hundreds of terabytes - we're approaching petabytes of data in a season."

Data collection is no joke, and it only continues to grow. The amount collected on a race weekend has grown from about 200GB in 2018 to 320GB today.

In the past, old or ‘cold' data would be transferred to tape for long-term storage, but Hackland has discontinued that practice.

"That's one of the reasons why the partnership with Acronis was so important: I couldn't be sure I could recover data from old tapes. We had three tape safes around the site that someone had to go and find [a tape], and if it wasn't properly categorised…

"I remember being asked for some data - they needed it within three days and we couldn't find the tape in time, so that just wasn't acceptable. We knew that wasn't acceptable."

Since then, Williams has moved a large portion of its infrastructure to the Acronis Cloud on Microsoft Azure, which helps users to find data quickly, without having to log a ticket. Cloud's scalability also helps Hackland to flex resource upwards when teams need more capacity, without taking on extra costs in quiet months. However, expanding further into cloud now would be counterproductive:

"Some systems, like our CAD system and the way that some of the ISVs work, are just not written for a cloud… You don't get a productivity or performance improvement, and maybe the ISV is not ready for cloud; so then on-premise makes sense. We built [our cloud] in a zero state that feels like it's on-premise anyway, so for our users, often they have no idea whether they are attaching to something that's in the cloud or not."

Pandemic performance

Despite the necessity of keeping some systems on-prem, the existing cloud stance was a great help when the pandemic hit last year.

"We were just able to scale [our remote work culture] up. We went from 30 concurrent designers, 70 in total that we had set up on the system, to 1,000 people having to work from home almost permanently. We're at about 70 per cent now; about 30 per cent of our staff are regularly on-site...

"It was a year ago today [3^rd March] that we logged an IT risk in the register. I checked. It said, ‘We may have to send all our colleagues home, how are we going to provide that IT service?' And within a week we'd scaled everything up, working with some of our partners to make sure people could go home."

Williams expanded its partnership with Acronis last year to use the Cyber Protect tool, which protects endpoints - and suddenly, there were a lot more endpoints, even though most were using a virtual desktop.

Cyber Protect also helped to take care of sensitive data from video conferencing, usage of which grew massively in the pandemic.

"What Acronis have helped us do is to make sure these conversations are protected; and that became really important to us, because we're now talking about money, about driver contracts, about everything that's confidential that usually is done in person. [In the past] we'd go meet a potential driver in a hotel down the road... Now it's all being done electronically, so we had to protect that."

While the pandemic has had impacts across the economy, it's also prompted some positive change. For Williams, that's meant an expansion in hiring practices and the remote work culture - with obvious benefits for employees.

"We've actually, within IT, hired people who are not based in the UK - that's a first. The culture in Formula One, not just Williams but everywhere, was ‘You come to the site'. There's still some value in coming to the site and seeing the car being built…[but] I think we'll operate in a hybrid model. People will still come to the site, will want that connectivity, will want that in-person relationship. But it's opened up the possibility of us hiring people who are not even based in the UK now.

"We've proven, as a whole organisation, we can work effectively in a mixed model. There are a whole bunch of people who have to come to the factory; they are building metal and carbon fibre and they have to be operating those machines. But there's a whole group of people who do not need to put themselves at risk during a pandemic, by coming to site; we've proven that as well. "

As of September last year, after 735 races, the Williams family no longer owns the team they founded. Instead, it is the first F1 team to be wholly owned by an investment firm. The new owners, Dorilton Capital, have been totally supportive of the hybrid model, and are allowing Hackland the freedom to work with any vendor he chooses - as long as it's right for the team.

"Our owners want us to be in a position where we can challenge for wins and championships. They're not putting pressure on us that it has to happen this year or next year, but they want to know from us what we need to get Sir Frank Williams' team back to the front of the grid."