Rounding out the 2020 season with its seventh Formula 1 World Championship in a row, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team has secured its place as one of the most successful teams in F1 history. As an official team partner, Pure Storage® has been front and center, helping drive the team’s breakthrough victory with high-performance data storage.
Counting myself among the legions of F1 fans, I’m awed by the incredible speed and agility of the machines, the superhuman athleticism of the drivers, and the high-level strategy of the competition. Naturally, we were all thrilled when team driver Lewis Hamilton—the most-winning driver in F1 history—ended the season with the Pure logo on his steering wheel.
Even more exciting is knowing that our brand’s placement isn’t just for show. Pure helped the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team continuously boost performance and innovate to maintain a record-setting winning streak.
Placing Data in the Driver’s Seat
The Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team added its first FlashArray™ five years ago. Today, the team has most of its applications on Pure, giving it a single storage infrastructure shared across all platforms. This has fueled a range of benefits and even some unforeseen improvements that have helped the team’s immediate and long-term performance.
For example, a frequently used query to a SQL server database that once took 4.5 minutes to execute can now be completed in just 13 seconds. With this kind of speed, it’s no wonder the Team refers to Pure Storage as its “unfair advantage.”
The Team’s engineers, analysts, and race strategists analyze data collected from more than 200 physical sensors in its cars. This allows them to glean every possible insight to enhance performance. Additional data is continuously gathered from the factory and track—currently averaging 20TB/day. That’s more than twice the data from just two years ago.
Putting the Brakes on Rising Operating Costs
Considering the hectic race schedule across multiple continents, logistics is a tremendous focus for every F1 team, especially when it comes to saving money and time. Along with cars, tools, and parts, each team ships IT equipment to every race. They must then rapidly assemble and disassemble the hardware on-site.
With the simplicity of Pure, the team’s storage administrators now spend mere hours configuring and tuning instead of days—saving both time and money. And the smaller footprint of Pure arrays helps contain operating costs, resulting in a 68% reduction in the Team’s data-center rack space.
Capturing the Checkered Flag
As this F1 season comes to an end, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team is already looking ahead to 2021. It plans to maintain its leadership position by making continuous improvements with the help of Pure.
And while your business may run at a slightly slower pace than the cars of an F1 racing team, you can still leverage high-performance data to stay ahead of the competition. Use FlashArray, to overcome the challenges of traditional storage and gain the boost that delivers breakthrough speed, agility, and cost savings.