On Friday, Ars was invited behind the scenes of the Caterham Formula 1 racing team at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin. The invite came courtesy of Dell, which has heavily partnered with the Caterham team. The OEM was very eager to show off the ways in which it's making its IT experience work trackside.

Caterham F1 is a much smaller racing concern than the big F1 players like Red Bull or Ferrari. The British F1 team has only about 400 employees, and the key to remaining competitive is that old corporate buzzword, efficiency.

Surprisingly, a great deal of the stuff that Caterham leans on would be quite familiar to just about any enterprise sysadmin. We spoke for a while with Caterham trackside engineer Anthony Smith and Caterham F1 team CIO Bill Peters, and they both rattled off a list of names and technologies at home in any traditional datacenter: Dell PowerEdge servers, VSphere for server virtualization, and SSD-filled EqualLogic storage arrays to keep things running.

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Lee Hutchinson

Peters described the relationship with Dell in glowing terms. The Caterham F1 team had a very short inception, and on the IT side of the house, Peters decided to partner with Dell as the technology provider due to Dell's ability to provide hardware and services across an entire range of different areas. To save time, money, and weight, all of the computing for the Caterham trackside garage is run out of a half-rack containing three Dell PowerEdge servers running VSphere on a pair of EqualLogic iSCSI disk arrays. VSphere provides about 30 virtual hosts during the race. The servers are used by the track engineers and also by Caterham personnel back in the UK.

"At the higher level, we're doing the same as other teams, but we've adopted things they've not. We decided to virtualize everything from the get-go," Peters continued. "Traditionally, trackside IT for Formula 1 is physical servers serving one purpose as simply as possible—less chance of failures. A lot of the other teams transport about five racks of equipment—we move half of one rack." Because the team sets up and tears down their entire garage between every race and must transport the entire show all across the world, there are very real cost savings in reducing the amount of gear that must be shipped.

Caterham's cars on the track spew a constant torrent of wireless data back to the engineers in the garage, and each bit is carefully analyzed and then archived. The amount of data from a single car can be as much as a gigabyte per lap; having remote engineers connect in via Remote Desktop and look at the data housed trackside is much, much easier than trying to transmit gigabytes and gigabytes of data back from the track to the UK.

The data being analyzed isn't just used to determine gross vehicle settings, either—both Peters and Smith described a highly data-driven decision-making process where for every race lap run, the team simulates as many as 20,000 variations and outcomes on a small Dell HPC cluster. The simulations are used to firm up overall race strategy, so that the team can direct the drivers on exactly how to drive.

We were given a garage tour (during which we were unfortunately not allowed to take any pictures), and the level of security was extremely high—we had to proceed through multiple guarded checkpoints to get anywhere near the garage area, and it took more to reach the garage. With a trio of pretty standard-looking Dell servers and disk arrays sitting in a small closet, I had to ask: what does the Caterham team do if a part fails?

Smith laughed and explained that part failures happen the same as with any other enterprise gear. Caterham pays for four-hour "on site" servicing, but they have replacement components couriered instead to whatever hotel the team is staying in because of security.

IT tends to be IT the world over—whether it's racing or aerospace or health care, the large trends are mostly the same. Caterham is dealing with the same pressures to virtualize and use less equipment more efficiently as are many non-race-car-related IT departments. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to actually drive one of the cars to see if Caterham's virtualization-heavy, data-driven approach to racing could improve my ability to nail an apex at high speeds.

There's always next year, though.

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson