February 2015 | Artemis Racing R&D Edge Success | page 1.

“OneBlox, with its continuous data protection, enables our engineers to work freely without the risk of losing any data.”

- Alex Placentra, Sr. Network System Administrator, Artemis Racing

Business Challenges

• Lengthy file restore times negatively impacted engineering productivity

• Windows and ZFS-based storage appliances consumed too much time and were unable to meet unpredictable growth requirements

• Needed to seamlessly, and rapidly, expand storage capacity based on test race results

The IT agility concept is often misused but when it comes to specific use cases where research, development, collaboration and business activities all contribute to the success of the entire team, an agile IT infrastructure is fundamental in avoiding any form of friction and helps in the pursuit of victory.

Artemis Racing is a multinational yacht racing team representing Kungliga Svenska Segel Sällskapet (KSSS – the Royal Swedish Yacht Club), the fifth-oldest yacht club in the world, in the upcoming 35th America’s Cup in 2017. The crew is comprised of some of the most successful and respected sailors in the world. With 61 America’s Cup campaigns, including 14 victories, the team members have already competed in 21 Olympic Games, winning 11 medals, including 7 Gold medals.

The America’s Cup, which has seen a drastic evolution of its rules, now races with huge 62 feet foiling wing sail catamarans capable of literally flying on the water at astonishing speeds. The America’s Cup is considered the Formula 1 race of the seas: the best sailors on the fastest vessels. Each yacht is designed with major contributions from aerospace engineers and precision built with next generation carbon fiber materials. Just as the rules, materials and vessels have evolved, so too has the design and development process which has now become highly data-driven.

When Alex Placentra, Sr. Network Administrator, was looking for a storage infrastructure to support the next America’s Cup campaign, he needed to find something capable of simplifying the job of team members, who work on different types of computers and applications, while giving the best in terms of data protection, security and scalability.

Exablox, with its continuous data protection mechanism, seamless Active Directory integration, ease of use and scale-out architecture was Alex’s choice to back the Artemis Racing team with a secure storage infrastructure capable of managing the unpredictable data growth they’ll encounter in the next few years leading up to the race.

Customer Success Story

Artemis Gets R&D Edge with Exablox Artemis Racing enhances boats R&D agility with Exablox

February 2015 | Artemis Racing R&D Edge | page 2

OneSystem’s cloud-based management is extremely valuable as it removes many of the things I need to worry about as a storage administrator.”

- Alex Placentra, Sr. Network System Administrator

The Business Challenges

Artemis Racing Team constantly collects data from various sources and uses high performance computing (HPC) to process it while designers and engineers use Computer Aided design software and HPC applications to develop and build their next generation America’s Cup catamaran. Every individual sailing practice run is a source of new data. All boat telemetry and navigation logs must be saved safely to be reviewed over time. All data and simulations are then confronted with real sailing experiences and this process is constantly repeated to look for flaws and possible improvements.

For this kind of project, collaboration is really important to speed up the development process and various groups are created to manage different parts of the design. Groups and ACLs (Access Control Lists) are fundamental to keep all the access permissions under control and prevent data losses or leaks.

At the same time, the backup and restore process should be seamless, quick and on-going all day long, without impacting the work of the designers and allowing end users to recover data immediately when needed. A remote replication mechanism must be implemented for all the data.

Before finding Exablox, Alex Placentra tried other solutions ranging from traditional Windows servers to ZFS-based appliances, He soon realized the complexity and limitations of these platforms resulted in a lot of time consuming activities to deliver the basic yet bullet-proof services his organization needed.

The Solution

Artemis Racing chose Exablox OneBlox because its feature set is perfectly aligned with today’s collaborative needs, file serving, data protection and limitless scalability via its scale-out architecture.

One of the most popular features with end users is CDP (Continuous Data Protection). In practice the system continuously takes snapshots of shared volumes and users can recover files back in seconds by themselves. The mechanism is very easy to use, the snapshots are represented to the user as a virtual read-only directory from which the required files can be copied back to the original location or to wherever needed. Alex will soon also take advantage of the remote replication capabilities to improve its protection scheme.

Artemis Racing has been able to leverage ACLs and Group policies to empower security and control over data and users. In fact, Exablox OneBlox is tightly integrated with Active Directory and can inherit these configurations right from the directory server without any further effort. The OneBlox Ring is accessible via SMB3 as well as NFS, giving Artemis Racing the ability to work with different applications and operating systems access to a single pool of scale-out storage.

OneSystem cloud-based management platform is a valuable service because of its balance between ease of use and innovative features. This helps offload the network administrator from many basic and redundant tasks. At the same time, thanks to its SaaS nature, OneSystem can safely maintain full control of the infrastructure and status of its health, even if it is deployed in different sites or when the system administrator is remotely connected to a public network.

February 2015 | Artemis Racing R&D Edge Success | page 3.

Realized Benefits

• Decreased storage management time by 50%

• Seamlessly scaled storage capacity with zero configuration

• Nearly instantaneous file recovery

“Complexity and limitations of legacy storage architectures require too much time consuming activities to create enterprise, bullet-proof, file services.”

Alex Placentra

The Artemis Racing design team, which is continually growing, will be producing phenomenal amounts of data for different applications in the next couple of years. OneBlox, thanks to its object-based scale-out architecture, is ready to sustain any of Artemis Racing’s requirements from both a capacity and scalable performance point of view.

The Benefits OneBlox and OneSystem are helping Artemis Racing with a seamless solution that includes robust file services and an advanced data protection system to help speed up design of the new boats for the next America’s Cup.

Continuous Data Protection is one of the features end users appreciate the most because their files are always backed up and they can recover them in seconds, without IT department intervention.

From the infrastructure perspective, simplicity and ease of use of OneSystem cloud-based management combined with OneBlox’s scale-out architecture and all-inclusive licensing model grant Artemis Racing a future-proof platform. OneBlox can expand with maximum freedom in function of the needs of the Artemis Racing team with virtually no limits.

Conclusion

Artemis Racing has built a very agile storage system enabling the design team to do more work faster without having to worry about issues usually associated with critical infrastructures such as this one.

Collaboration between the team members is greatly improved while maintaining high security levels. In this particular case, for a team like Artemis Racing, collaboration is all about sharing information in a complex process involving many different steps and people. This process ranges, from thinking out the design, to making complex simulations, to building the boat and its components, to comparing results collected from the field, and then back again to the initial point after confronting simulations with reality.

Data is a fundamental part of all this iterative process and storage infrastructure agility and security are crucial aspects for avoiding any form of friction while accelerating research and development activities.

Company Artemis Racing

artemis-racing.americascup.com