Porsche revs up Formula E team with NetApp hybrid cloud | Computer Weekly
Summary
Porsche’s Formula E team takes cars to 16 races in a season, and has a 24-hour setup time for events held on city streets with a wide variety of conditions and potential changes to courses. Even though it is almost entirely cloud-dependent, head of motorsport IT at Porsche, Friedemann Kurz, speaking at NetApp’s Insight event at the Hockenheimring in Germany last week, said the model can scale well to enterprise use cases. On Wednesdays before race weekends, teams arrive and spend a full day on setup, bringing a ruggedised server rack with storage managed by NetApp Global File Cache (GFC), which handles movement of data between local hardware, the Azure cloud and the Porsche datacentre. “To prepare for the race, they need to apply data into the car and all the updates regarding the track, surface, to the weather, even the course layout, which can change in these types of venues. “If you’re operating worldwide and have several branches with these kinds of requirements and optimised management of storage hosted in the cloud, the savings can get bigger as it scales.