Red Bull Technology deploys 3Par for resilient F1 data access-Cliff Saran Monday 11 June 2012 16:20

Red Bull Technology is using HP 3Par storage to maintain 24/7 access to vital data for the development of its Formula One race team cars. The company that designs, engineers and builds the chassis for the Red Bull Racing Formula One team has worked with converged infrastructure specialist OCSL to deploy 3Par's scalable storage system. “Our new HP storage system enables the team to get the most out of critical engineering, manufacturing and trackside applications, which are vital to improving the performance of our cars,” said Matt Cadieux, chief information officer at Red Bull Technology. "HP 3Par Storage has also future-proofed the system by providing us with the scalability to handle desktop virtualisation and more complex simulations over the next two years," he said. Red Bull Technology’s structured data is now held on the HP 3Par system for analysis to support decisions from chassis design to race strategy. Tiered storage in each chassis ensures that the most active data is always rapidly accessible, while HP 3Par Adaptive Optimization Software, an autonomic storage-tiering solution, increases agility and minimises risk. “A lot of elements of the business require 24/7 [operations]. In its request for proposals, Red Bull asked for five nines availability – there is hardly any downtime," said Chris Townsend, team leader at OCSL. The team has been using 3Par for six months. It runs dual-redundant HP 3Par F400 Storage systems in two datacentres to provide a mirrored system between sites for disaster recovery. HP 3Par GeoCluster Software is used to automate Red Bull Technology’s disaster recovery process by automating storage failover between primary and back-up sites to ensure business continuity. HP 3PAR Virtual Copy software provides offsite tape back-up and application recovery. The storage infrastructure is being used for the team’s PLM (product lifecycle management) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and for structured data collection from trackside.