F1 Team Chooses SD-WAN for Global Race Connectivity

Kerv Connect has been working with a famous Formula 1 race team on their requirement for an efficient, centrally managed and flexible network solution to cater to their connectivity needs at the various race venues in a calendar year.

The race team had the challenge of delivering a cost-effective connectivity solution to 23 different race sites around the world, each site seeing network activity for only three weeks at a time. At race sites, they had a high bandwidth requirement due to the high level of technology deployed for the races, as well as the requirement to transfer large amounts of time-sensitive data from track-side to their UK HQ. This resulted in significant global MPLS costs for the team who had 23 annualised MPLS contracts in place for 365 days of the year, of which they only had a requirement for 14 days. Reducing this inefficiency and associated costs was an absolute priority for the team and their motivation for investigating alternative solutions. The teams needed a solution that would allow them to move away from their expensive, fixed line solution to multiple, cheaper internet connections, without compromising on bandwidth or application performance.

Kerv Connect was able to provide the team with independent industry advice with regards to competing SD-WAN solutions on the market and help establish use cases for each. The team decided to trial two SD-WAN vendors over a year to establish which one best satisfied their requirements. Due to a large amount of structured and unstructured data being created at each race and sent back to HQ for analysis, it quickly became apparent that WAN optimisation was a critical requirement and therefore Silver Peak the most suitable SD-WAN vendor for this use case.

Deploying a Silver Peak solution gave the team the ability to use commodity internet for race day connectivity instead of expensive fixed lease MPLS, while still ensuring application performance when it came to the generation and transport of huge amounts of track-side data. The race teams was then able to decommission their expensive MPLS links and replace them with local internet connections using Silver Peak.

The solution was delivered across SD-WAN appliances with a small onsite footprint, allowing them to be decommissioned and redeployed at new race sites with ease. Further, the solution enabled the use of different pre-existing connections at the various race sites, and provided stability in the wavering underlay parameters around the world.