Business needIn a quest for its 17th Formula 1 world

championship, Williams constantly

needs to refine its IT services to

provide employees with the best

solutions for competitive advantage.

SolutionWilliams worked with Dell on two

separate projects. First to migrate

its email and instant messaging to

Microsoft Office 365, and second to

install Dell XC Series web-scale hyper-

converged appliances in its trackside

and factory environments.

Benefits• Team completes migration on time,

within budget and with 99 per cent

user satisfaction

• Employees collaborate more

effectively with tools that are simple

to use

• Executive committee sees

immediate improvement in usability

• Hyper-converged architecture lets

engineers access data in seconds

instead of minutes for trackside

analysis

• Simplified management frees up

days of staff time to make crucial

upgrades elsewhere

• Lightweight trackside infrastructure

saves $150,000 on freight fees

each season

Solutions at a glance• Enterprise Deployment• Enterprise Support• Software Defined Storage• Mobility

Accelerating innovation

Williams Formula 1 team keeps modernisation on track with projects to improve collaboration and revamp trackside infrastructure

Customer profile

Company Williams

Industry Sports & Gaming

Country United Kingdom

Employees 700

Website www.williamsf1.com

“Dell ProSupport Plus is excellent. For example, we needed a replacement power supply for a server when we were trackside in Brazil. By the time the engineers got back to their hotel that evening there was a replacement waiting.” Phil Cooper, IT Infrastructure Manager, Williams

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“ It’s the only project I’ve ever worked on where people were coming to me every day asking to migrate because the person next to them was on the pilot programme. User satisfaction is more than 99 per cent.” Graeme Hackland, IT Director, Williams

Today the team is still competing at the very highest level, and all 700 employees across the business are working towards winning a 17th championship.

“IT underpins everything we do at Williams,” says Phil Cooper, IT Infrastructure Manager. “From concept and initial design to running the car trackside, we wouldn’t even be able to start a car without a laptop to monitor the systems.” Recently, Williams embarked on two projects with long-term supplier Dell. First to improve collaboration, and second to upgrade the company’s trackside infrastructure.

Team seeks better collaboration toolsWhen Graeme Hackland joined Williams as IT Director, the executive committee identified collaboration as being a top priority and part of the team’s overall IT strategy. The committee wanted all staff to have the right tools at their disposal to help produce a winning Formula 1 car. The firm had already decided to move away from IBM Notes to Microsoft Exchange. Hackland says: “We chose to go with Office 365 instead of an on-premises solution because we couldn’t beat the service level agreements at the Office 365 price point.”

Williams has worked with Dell since 2005, and the two teams regularly meet to discuss IT strategy and roadmaps. Over the course of these meetings, Hackland became aware that Dell could help Williams migrate. “Dell put forward the best design for how the migration would work,” says Hackland. “We didn’t specify how the migration should happen or put

limitations on it. We left it up to the vendors to work that out.” Hackland also thought Dell’s migration tools – such as Migrator for Notes to Exchange, Coexistence Manager for Notes and MessageStats – offered the best solution to transferring all employees’ existing emails, contacts and calendar information.

Migrating to the cloud is a big successWith a tight budget and six-month window to complete the migration, the executive committee at Williams was delighted to see the project comfortably meet both. It also encountered very few issues for a project of its size.

Formula 1 (F1) is the jewel in the crown of motorsport,

offering the highest drama and most glamorous races,

and subsequently drawing the biggest crowds. Few F1

teams have the pedigree of Williams, which has been

winning championships since its foundation by Frank

Williams in 1977.

Products & Services

Services

Dell Support Services –Dell ProSupport Plus

Dell Migration Services

Dell Consulting Services

Dell Education Services

Hardware

Dell XC Series web-scale converged appliances

Software

Migrator for Notes to Exchange

Coexistence Manager for Notes

MessageStats

Partner Microsoft Office 365

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Hackland says: “It’s the only project I’ve ever worked on where people were coming to me every day asking to migrate because the person next to them was on the pilot programme. User satisfaction with the new environment is more than 99 per cent.” The executive committee in particular saw an immediate improvement because most of them work remotely, so they benefitted directly from easier access to their emails, for example.

Hackland attributes this success to several factors, not least the close working relationship between Dell and Williams. Dell project managed the move, giving weekly updates to the executive board, and provided users with their preferred format of training material via Dell LEAP, an online portal and a part of Dell’s Training Services. “One of the other things we liked was Dell’s workshops, which we ran as each department migrated,” says Hackland. “For a few days after each migration we also had Dell people ‘floorwalking,’ being on hand to help with users’ questions as they migrated.”

Easier collaborationHackland believes both internal and external collaboration have improved since the migration. “We work with third parties all around the world and with multiple design teams. This has become much easier,” he says. “Collaboration with our power unit supplier has improved dramatically at the track and between factories because we’re federated on Office 365, meaning we can communicate much more easily.” While it’s difficult to put a figure on how this project translates to on-track success, Hackland is confident of its benefits. “It helps us win business and enhance performance, but it’s also part of our strategic move to more modern IT tools,” he says.

From one success to anotherShortly after the migration to Office 365, Williams again chose to work with Dell on the trackside and factory infrastructures. During the racing season, the trackside infrastructure travels across the world with the team, powering the entire operation and supporting more than 120 staff in everything from data analytics to sending emails. The hardware has to survive some harsh conditions, being installed in dusty, humid garages with no air conditioning, so Williams refreshes it every two years.

A new look at storage and computeAs well as a simple hardware refresh, Phil Cooper and his team decided to look at alternative architectures to the virtualized Dell servers and storage they had been using. Increasingly large data sets produced by the car’s telemetry system, plus the proliferation of high-definition video, meant that the I/O (input/output) of storage was causing bottlenecks. It could take engineers up to three minutes to open up a data set for analysis. When they only have an hour between practice sessions to fine-tune the car and are dealing with multiple data sets at any one time, every minute counts.

Again, thanks to Williams’ close working relationship with Dell, Cooper decided to test out a hyper-converged solution, where compute resources and storage capacity are combined into a single chassis. Dell offers this in its XC Series web-scale converged appliance with Nutanix. He and the team ran some benchmark tests. “The benefits were so huge that moving to a hyper-converged architecture was a no-brainer,” says Cooper. “It was so far beyond our previous architecture. We simulated different workloads and achieved between 10 and 11 times the throughput that we were getting on our network attached storage.”

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Now engineers can access the same data sets as before in around six seconds, as opposed to two to three minutes. This means they can make better informed decisions about configuring the car before a race.

Lightweight IT slashes shipping costs Williams installed four of the Dell XC appliances in its trackside environment, and five at its factory in the U.K. One other advantage for Williams is that by reducing the physical amount of equipment, they have massively lowered the cost of shipping it to each Grand Prix. Cooper says: “We save $150,000 per season in shipping costs. This is a big deal because it’s money we can now spend on improving car performance.” Williams predicts that over the expected lifecycle of three years the solution will recoup 100 per cent of its investment across both trackside and factory environments.

Round-the-world supportWhile Williams was impressed by the architecture of the solution, a significant factor in deciding to go with Dell was the great support. As the team travels from race to race, it retains a central Technical Account Manager (TAM) based in the U.K. via Dell ProSupport Plus for F1. The TAM deals with any support queries and then relays them to the local Dell support teams, wherever they are.

Cooper says: “Dell ProSupport Plus is excellent. For example, we needed a replacement power supply for a server when we were trackside in Brazil. By the time the engineers got back to their hotel that evening there was a replacement waiting.”

Simplified management frees up staffBecause of the hyper-converged architecture of the solution, Williams staff were able to set it up in less than an hour, as opposed to the two weeks it would have taken using a traditional server and storage design. Cooper says: “From a management point of view it’s much simpler. It’s freed up people to focus on upgrading our trackside networking, pitwall and garage environments. We knew these things needed addressing, but we were always busy maintaining the environment we had.”

A winning teamWilliams hopes that its recent projects with Dell will make the team more agile, and enable staff and suppliers to collaborate more effectively. This will provide the powerful infrastructure Williams needs to drive success both off and on the track.

Dell, the Dell logo, Dell ProSupport and MessageStats are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. Availability and terms of Dell Software, Solutions and Services vary by region. This case study is for informational purposes only. Dell makes no warranties — express or implied — in this case study. Reference Number: 10022447 © September 2015, Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved

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“ We save $150,000 per season in shipping costs. This is a big deal because it’s money we can now spend on improving car performance.” Phil Cooper, IT Infrastructure Manager, Williams