As the British Grand Prix approaches this weekend, the Lotus F1 team has unveiled a new operations network that it hopes will help get it up this season's rankings.
Currently standing a close fourth in the Constructors’ Championship after the first seven races, Lotus has built a mission-critical network infrastructure using Juniper’s portfolio of switching, security, wireless LAN, routing and application software systems, with the aim of improving flexibility and enhancing performance.
In addition, Lotus has deployed Juniper QFabric technology in its two data centres to "flatten the network architecture to reduce latency and improve performance", and is creating a "mission-critical, carrier-class private cloud environment".
The new LAN (local area network) connectivity across Lotus F1's headquarters campus in Oxfordshire is said to provide a reliable, high-performance fixed and wireless network platform to power vital, data-intensive functions, such as the company’s research and development, its design suite, wind tunnel facility and engineering shop.
In the future, Juniper will also provide LAN, WAN (wide area network) and remote connectivity trackside at Grand Prix races globally and at numerous testing sessions.
“From the design concept of each season’s car, through component engineering and production to testing, qualifying and competing at each race, we have to deliver innovation with no margin for failure, error or delay," said Patrick Louis, CEO of Lotus F1.
"Our network underpins the entire operation, so we need a partner who is equally innovative and reliable, and who can secure the highly valuable data we share across the team."
To illustrate the point Lotus F1 says it generates 15MB of data per lap, per car, per race, with just under 1,000 statistics per lap being calculated and presented back to race engineers. Each race weekend generates in excess of 50GB of data. In 2012 Lotus F1 moved more than 4.5TB of data across the world.
Last year the Supersonic car project BLOODHOUND SSC deployed a fibre network to keep pace with the demands of trying to design a car that can travel at 1,000mph.
Virgin Media Business installed a 1Gbps fibre optic network at the project's Bristol headquarters to support its team of engineers, and also help educate students at over 5,000 schools and colleges across the country about the project.