Acronis hits the grid with Williams partnership

Storing data is just as important as collecting it for F1 teams

Formula One racing is one of the world's most technologically advanced sports, generating hundreds of gigabytes of data from car telemetry alone every race weekend. Teams have long acknowledged the importance of data, but bringing the same attention to data storage has been a long process.

Last week, cloud backup and security firm Acronis entered into a partnership with Williams Martini Racing Formula One (Williams F1) to solve that problem, and we at Computing visited the Williams factory in Oxfordshire to learn more.

Williams will use Acronis solutions for cloud backup, data protection, disaster recovery, software-defined storage and file sync and share.

Graeme Hackland is Williams F1's CIO. He has been reporting on data risk, which he describes as "a red box that we want to turn green," to the team's board since he joined Williams four years ago.

Teams were quite conservative when Hackland entered the racing world in 1971. That's no longer possible, and he told us that he spends a lot of time trying to bring new technology partners into Williams; Acronis is one of them.

"Absolutely everything [in racing] is data driven," Hackland said. Williams collects around 200GB of data every race weekend, and uses its analysis to fuel future decisions. That collection actually represented a problem to the team, which when Hackland joined was totally on-prem.

"We had to flush a fair amount of data because we couldn't afford to keep it all," he said. Now, in the middle of its digital transformation - Williams runs about 40 per cent of its business-critical apps in the cloud, and paper-based processes have been digitised - that is less of a problem.

The move wasn't entirely risk-free, though. Without a dedicated backup solution, Williams had to rely on cloud vendors to protect its data, which was limiting. By partnering with Acronis on backup, Hackland said, the team is free to pursue niche providers and startups at the cutting edge of technology.

Cloud ensures resilience

A key part of the new partnership has been moving archive data to the cloud, which includes years of tape storage. "We've been learning a lot about what tapes last longer than a year," Hackland quipped.

Despite engineers insisting on most of Williams' data being available in fast frontline storage, 80 per cent of it hasn't been accessed in the last four years. Working with Acronis, Williams has been ‘tiering' its data by order of importance as it moves it to the cloud.

Acronis hits the grid with Williams partnership

Storing data is just as important as collecting it for F1 teams

The president of Acronis, John Zanni, elaborated on how the firm ensures the longevity of cloud data. "We use very specific storage software, Acronis Storage. It allows you to turn a knob to raise resilience - of course, that usually means an increased cost in terms of hardware. [But] our backup is specifically designed to last a very, very long time - decades."

Acronis Storage, Zanni told us when we caught up with him privately later, uses a RAID array of virtual machines. "We're even going beyond that now, where we're using blockchain technology to digitally sign these backups, so when you go to recover them that data hasn't changed at all," he said.

Blockchain would instantly solve the challenge of corrupted data, which is a big problem with tape storage, but latency is an issue. Acronis is trialling blockchain now, and may turn it into a product in the future.

Zanni said, "Like the internet transformed the world, blockchain will transform us again."

The right data to the right person at the right time

Using cloud backup from Acronis, Williams will be free to explore niche and cutting-edge cloud providers, said CIO Graeme Hackland

According to Zanni, Williams is the perfect partner for Acronis. "Their need is very much aligned with our vision: there's lots of data and any solution needs to be easy to use and fast. If backup is not fast and reliable, nothing else matters."

The "scale and breadth" of Williams' infrastructure was another draw for Acronis, which previously sponsored rival team Scuderia Torro Rosso. As well as data from the track and labs, which is relatively short-lived, Williams is also using Acronis' solutions to protect data from its Advanced Engineering Division. This IP can be used for more than 70 years in road cars, hospitals, aerospace and more, so long-term backup is vital.

When it comes to track performance, Hackland described how Acronis would help Williams get data to the right person at the right time. This is particularly a problem with older information, which in F1 terms is anything generated more than three months ago.

It can take more than 24 hours for an engineer to retrieve information now, as all requests need to go through an IT helpdesk; that's no good in F1 terms. Under the new system, "When one of these creative people comes up with an idea and needs data, they'll be able to go back through the IT infrastructure that they're used to and click on an icon to get it," Hackland said. "It's about getting results really quickly and giving an engineer that data so that they can continue with the creative design process."

Zanni told us that Acronis is working on additions to its software-defined storage solution that will enable search functionality for both structured and unstructured data. He sees a future in which a search term like ‘Videos where John is happy' will produce relevant results (although maybe not for F1).

To do this, Acronis is working on artificial intelligence and machine learning technology that will be smart enough to write its own metadata. "No-one tags their own data," he said.

The first implementation of Acronis' search functionality should be released later this year.