Force India Formula One Team on Track With Infortrend

Infortrend announced that the Force India Formula One Team has adopted Infortrend’s ESVA F20 storage solution.

Adrian Collinson, Head of IT at Force India, stated: "Infortrend’s ESVA F20 storage solution is the perfect match for our operations. Its easy expansion and high performance levels, combined with simple management, allow us to efficiently and safely store all the data involved in our efforts to enhance Force India’s ongoing success on the racing track."

The main applications for which Force India requires storage systems include computer-aided design (CAD) and race telemetry data. The difference between winning and losing in Formula One is often a matter of milliseconds, and therefore every improvement that can be achieved in both the design of the car or by tracking the car’s performance during testing and racing is essential. The storage systems originally used by the team were no longer able to meet its requirements, and after a selection process, the team decided to adopt Infortrend’s ESVA F20 storage system combined with an ESVA J20 expansion enclosure. The ESVA F20 and J20 support the team’s powerful SAN, and provide the team with large storage capacity and excellent reliability.

The ESVA offers the performance benefits of storage virtualization. Features such as automatic load balancing technology and thin provisioning ensure the most efficient utilization of pooled storage capacity and bandwidth. Featuring the latest 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host connectivity and superior bandwidth, the ESVA F20 is able to meet and support all of Force India’s SAN requirements.

The main storage system and expansion enclosure are managed by Infortrend’s SANWatch management software, allowing Force India’s IT administrators to manage the complete storage configuration through a single user interface. Currently, Force India has stored 20TB of data on Infortrend’s storage systems. With flexible drive support, the ESVA F20 and J20 combined can provide a maximum storage capacity of 64TB, allowing for future data growth without replacing or adding new systems. However additional Infortrend’s expansion enclosures can be added to the main storage system through simple expansion links without any downtime when required.

Force India requires that its IT resources are available 24×7 to support all of the team’s operations. The ESVA F20 meets this requirement with a number of features. The ESVA F20 comes with storage-based replication capabilities. Space-efficient snapshots can serve as granular recovery points based on which files can be restored and data can be rolled back. Full data copies created within or across storage pool(s) can be readily leveraged by host applications, to resume production when the original data is corrupted. With these features, the Force India team is able to ensure the highest data availability with a minimum of service downtime in case the storage is damaged by logical or physical errors.

More about Force India’s adoption of the ESVA solution