>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. (techno music) >> Back to The Cube, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. We are in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. This is a really cool building built in 1915, loads of history with artists. I'm with Dave Vellante. I'm wearing prints today in honor of the venue and we're excited to be joined by longtime Pure Storage customer Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport head of IT Matt Harris. Matt, it's great to see you again. >> Hey, good up, good morning I should say. >> I think it is still morning somewhere. (laughter) >> So, Matt, you know, for folks who aren't that familiar with Formula One one of the things, you know I'm a fan. It's such a data intense sport. You've got to set up a data center 21 times a year, across the globe, with dramatically different weather conditions, humidity, etc. Give our viewers an idea of your role as head of IT and what it is that your team needs to enable the drivers to do? >> Okay, so in general terms, we're but like any other normal business around the world. Yeah we have huge amounts of data created depending on what your company is doing. Ours comes from two cars going around the track. That is the lifeblood of our of our work, our day work, and all that data is always analyzed to work out how we can improve the car. But what we really have is an infrastructure the same as many other companies. We have some slight differences as you say. We go to 21 countries. In those countries we turn around and we have 36 hours roughly to put everything together in a different world, different place and then everybody turns up and uses it as though it's a branch office. A hundred people roughly sat there working in the normal environment. We use it for five days and then we take it apart in six hours, put it in two boxes, take it to another country, and we do the same thing again. We do that 21 times. Sometimes back-to-back, sometimes with a week in between. Week in between is quite easy. Back to back sometimes we go from Canada maybe all the way across the world from Monaco within the space of a week so if we've got the flights in the way and everything else and we also end up having to an engineer a car, run a car around the track, and hopefully win races. >> So, you basically got a data kit that you take around with you. >> Yeah. >> And then what did you do before you had this capability? Was it just gut feel? Was it finger in the wind? >> Um, so. For about 15 years, we've been running what everybody's classes and Internet of Things we've been doing for about 15-20 years the car. It's got around these days around 300 sensors on it. Without those sensors realistically we'll be running the car blind and we probably couldn't even start the car let alone actually run it these days or improve things. We turn around and we're always ingesting data from the cars real-time. That real-time data actually we transfer to the garage. That's no problem at all but we also bring it back to the factory because we're limited on the number of people that are allowed to travel with the team. So, we're physically only allowed to take 60 people. Rules tell us we can only take 60 people to work on the car. Now of those, around about 15 are probably looking at data. We're generating around about half a terabyte per race weekend these days and 15 people, it's not enough eyes realistically to turn around and look at all that data all the time. So we take it back to the UK and in the UK, again, we have anywhere between another 30 and maybe 800 staff will be looking at that data to help analyze particularly on a Friday. Friday is about running the car and learning. We discussed a few minutes ago, what's the weather like? What are the tires like? What's the track like? Has there been any change in track? Has it been resurfaced? What's going on with the car compared to what we think is its optimum? And on a Friday's iterative change and learning about tire degradation, tire life, tire wear, the weather conditions, how they're going to interact with the car, all based on data. The interesting thing for me has always been that we have all this data but the two drivers in the car are the biggest sensor for us. They turn around and tell us how they felt. When they were going round corners, Was it good, bad, indifferent? But as soon as they tell us something, we always go to data. We've taken their interpretation of how their body felt, we turn around and then look at the data to prove what they've told us. So, an interesting anecdote very quickly. last year in Singapore, Valtteri was going across the bridge and he said he could feel that the throttle felt like it was cutting and we couldn't see in data and we were looking and looking and eventually he said, "No, it absolutely happens every time I cross the bridge." and they found a 20 millisecond gap in throttle application basically because there was a magnetic field that the bridge was creating so a sensor was actually cutting the throttle. he could feel it. we could fit that eventually see in data, shielded the sensor, everybody's happy. so you go from the human being could feel a 20th, a 20 millisecond gap in throttle application for us finding in data, engineering a solution, and changing things. >> So, the human's still a critical part of? (crosstalk) >> So, where does Pure Storage fit into this whole thing? and give us the before and after on that. >> So, three years ago we started working with Pure because I have two different solutions. one in the track and one in the factory. one in the track realistically I have some constraints around space, power, heat. that most people would love to take the racks as we were talking about we take around the world, they would love to leave in a nice air-conditioned computer room and just leave it there all year. we move it around but that rack of information we have to spend $298 per kilo to transport IT equipment around, well any equipment, around the world. So, we've got tons of equipment that we take around the world. it's thousands and thousands of pounds of freight cost. So, we went from forty U of old-school spinning disk, lots of complexity in cabling, administration, down to 2-3 U and 20 arrays. Now, they're more heat tolerant. I have two power cables in each and two network cables so complexity is gone. it just works. It's heat tolerant. it doesn't create a lot of heat so I haven't got the added issue of that. it's not using a huge amount of power so my UPS solution has to be smaller. so everything just got smaller, cheaper. really simply at the track, we improve the performance for everybody. from an IT point of view, we got very, very simple. incredibly easy to look after and manage but it's very reliable and performant at the same time. we then went to the factory where I've got 800 people looking at data. the problem is when a car goes round and we offload it, there's one single file. we haven't got this distributed amount of data that everybody. so you got one file that everybody's trying to open, old-school discs, you've now got contention for that one file that everybody's opening. So, people would come back from the track and go, "Why is it so slow to open information in the factory compared to at the track?" Trying to explain to them contention of data in those days was a little bit difficult but now we have 800 people that don't need to care and why that matters for us is decision making. So, if you think about qualifying, those that don't understand Formula One, we have three sessions of qualifying and the car goes out roughly two times in each qualifying session with around about a couple of minute gap in between the times the car goes out. that couple of minutes is about changing the car to be optimal for the next run. if it takes you minutes and minutes to offload data, open the data, review the information that the driver told you, and make a change, you can't go back out a second time. So, everything is about optimal performance for those engineers to optimize the performance of the car. what we are able to do now is to turn around and make sure that we're making correct decisions because rather than data taking two or three minutes to open, it's in seconds instead. So, you can look at the data, make an informed decision, change the car, hopefully improve every time the car goes out. >> One of the things, Matt, that Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure Storage, said this morning during the keynote was that less than half a percent of data in the world is analyzed. talk to us about what Pure Storage is able to facilitate for your team to be able to analyze that data. how much of that data are you able to analyze? and talk to us about the speed criticality. >> Yeah, okay, so, and quite a lot of the work over the previous probably 10 or 15 years has been very human centric. So, it's what data I know I need to go and look at to understand to be able to compute, to turn around and maybe infer information from to be able to make a better decision. So, strategy is probably one of the best places these days where the data that we're learning all the time. we have data about ourselves but we also have data about the other teams. those teams have the same data about us as well, your GPS data, timing data, so we know what's going on so we can infer information on a competitor as well as ourselves. tire degradation, tire wear, tire life, all things that you can infer that mean that you were mentioning earlier on about a pit stop. if a safety car comes out should you pick, shouldn't you pick. those decisions are now based on accurate data about whether we think competitor will pit, whether we think the competitors tires will last, can we overtake that competitor? because actually the track does or doesn't allow overtaking. So, lots of decisions made real-time based on exactly what's happening now but inferred from previous races and we're always learning all the time. everything is about the previous races. information we're learning every time. >> and how much of that heavy lifting of that data is machines versus humans. Are the machines increasingly, I don't want to say making the decisions, but helping? >> Yes, so, we're not in a position at the moment where the machines are making decisions. they're helping us to be informed, to visualize. Yeah, we work with the likes of TIBCO as well as Pure and other partners or sponsors that we have where they turn around and actually they help us to visualize that data. the problem we've got at the moment is we're still looking at all the data. where we really want to get to is looking at exceptions. So, actually the norm, don't show us that data. we don't need to know, don't need to care. >> Want the outliers. >> we want the outliers that. our problem though is that our car changes every time it goes out. So, an outlier could be because we've made a change. So, now you've got to still have some human that's helping at moto. we're trying to understand how we can use machine learning techniques. in certain places we can so image recognition and another bits and piece like that we can actually start to take advantage of but decisions necessarily around configuration and the next change to the car at the moment it's still indicators given to us by simulation and then a human at the end of the day is making the decision. >> and the data that you talked about that is on your competitors, is that a shared data source or is that but it is. >> Yeah. >> everybody shares the same data. >> every car has a transponder on it. basically it's GPS with longitude, latitude, and all sorts but incredibly accurate. if you consider the cars are doing 200 mile-an-hour, we have an accuracy of around about it's less than 10 centimeters accuracy at 200 miles per hour. Now, if you think of your GPS on your phone, you struggle to know whether you're on the right street sometimes. >> but your differentiation there is your your speed at which you can analyze the data, your algorithms, your skill sets you're telling. and then obviously we're here at Pure there's a component of that speed which is Pure. aren't you worried that your competitors are going to get your secrets or is everybody in the track use Pure Storage? >> everybody is turning around and using their own methodologies, their main, their own software. the thing for us at the moment is to make sure that we keep the really secret things ourselves, our IP sensitive, keep those to ourselves. So, what we do with our storage people know about and other teams are copying and seeing the advantages of Pure as well as some of the other tools and partners we partner with. the benefit of us though is that we have a partnership with Pure not just a purchasing so we work, we've known about some of the products. So, flash blade we knew about a long time before it was released. Yeah, we work with the team on what's coming. we know some of the advances in the technology before it's live and that's critical for us because we can get a stick, a march on everybody else even if we're six months ahead of somebody else on a technology or a way of doing something, six months is a long time in F1. >> Yeah. >> sorry Dave, I was going to say, Pure calls this the unfair advantage. (laughter) and you are, Mercedes has last fall won the fourth consecutive Constructors Championship. Coincidence, I don't know, but talk to us about this symbiotic relationship. are you also able to help influence the design of the technologies at Pure? >> Yeah, so, and I wouldn't say that we help design necessarily but they'll take into consideration our requirements and our wishes. like a number of other people that will be here, you've heard other people talking on stage and we'll always be talking about what we would like to be doing, what we could be doing if we had, I don't know, some new technology whether it's s3 connectivity to the flash blade, s whether it's NFS, whether it's SIF, whatever that would be, the containerization of them, the storage front end, whatever that would be we're always talking about how we can work with the Pure Storage to improve what we're doing. so that ideally I take out the way of the business. my ideal is that IT's not seen, it's not heard, and it just works. obviously in IT that's not always the case but. >> I want to unpack something you said earlier. you said it was I believe two or three years ago, three years ago that you brought in Pure and you had substantial performance improvement. I talk to a lot of customers and what they'll typically do in that situation is they'll compare what they saw in 2015 with what they replaced which was probably a five or eight year old array. true in your case or not? if it is true, which I suspect it is, it had to be something else that led you to Pure because you could have bought the incumbents all flash array and got you know much better performance. What, first of all true or not? and what was it that led you to Pure to switch from the incumbent which is not trivial? >> So quickly and was it five or eight year old hardware? in some places yes, some places no. So, it wasn't, we took a decision to take a step back and look at storage from a different standpoint because we just kept adding more discs to try and get around an issue, you know, and we've got a fairly strange data model to compute. we don't need much compute, we need lots of storage. so some of the models that were talked about on stage where I need, you know, Matt Baer was talking about the fact of I want some more storage, you need to buy some more compute and that was just so annoying for us. so there was different reasons but the end goal, you're quite right, performance. Yeah, we could have got it probably from anywhere and being brutally honest lots of other technologies could give the performance 'cause we don't give that level of performance maybe if your a service now or a big financial institution, we've got data, it's important. we've got critical time scales to open and save data, okay critical to us as far as erasing, but what was important for me was simplicity. Absolutely, now we got other benefits. the Evergreen model was brilliant for us but simplicity was critical. we had a storage guy that was spending his life managing storage. nobody manages storage now. they turn around and they go into Vmware. they want a new VMware server, they just spin it up, and the disk is associated. we don't have to think about it. you don't have that storage specialist any longer. Yeah, we started working with other partners, you know, Rubric for instance, integration with them, the Pure arrays as well, again enabling us to get out the way and not having to worry about backup. traditionally or we'd headed a guy that was always changing tape. I saw on the slide several time today about tape archive, I'm going I never want to see a tape archive. I just don't care about it any longer. I just want to be able to turn around and give the business, the SLAs they want on the their data and then not care about it. Also, can I then still turn around and mine that data in those archive or backup, not back up bin, the archive location? So, there's huge differences but simple is the best thing for me. we could have a small IT team that we have to look after a huge amount of kit and if it's complex it's just I can't employ the right people. >> Simplicity, performance, portability, you mentioned integration. you've got a big partner ecosystem here that. >> Yeah. >> So, having the ability to integrate seamlessly with Rubric, TIBCO, Satirize Key. >> and yeah for us, the partners are extension of the team. my team in particular because I can't turn around and just keep adding staff. we have to look after the day-to-day and keep the lights on but I can't just keep adding staff to look after a new technology. it needs to look after itself so the simplicity is absolutely. performance was a sort of a no-brainer. evergreen was a brilliant one for us because just not having to do those forklift upgrades. I think in the three years, we've gone from M450s to M70s, we've gone from M20s to M50s, M50R2s. we've done all of these. I've been stood on stage before in a day when we've been doing an upgrade during the time I've been stood on stage. You know and so people talk about the forklift upgrade, I don't have to worry about it, it doesn't happen. >> totally non-disruptive. >> Yeah, yeah. >> you do change out the controllers right? >> Yeah, so we change out controllers. we've done all sorts, we've gone from capacity upgrade so complete shells of discs and completely different on from I can't remember the exact size from two terabyte to three terabyte drives, new controllers to give us the new functionality with the nvme and all during the day. we don't do it out of hours. there's a lot of the business a scared stiff when we turn around the wisp and they go oh no no no but we're running the winds on low. we're doing this CFD, we go doesn't matter zero downtime no matter zero no planned. obviously no one play it's planned? >> Yes, it's planned downtime but the user doesn't see it they no performance no downtime no nothing that's Nevada for RIT. Yeah, well it means I don't have to keep asking people to do long shifts through the night to do a simple upgrade what should be a simple your weekends are nice back hopefully we end up with we end up racing those unfortunately okay but that's the fun stuff yeah for those who aren't that familiar was Formula One I encourage you to check it out it's one of the coolest strategic sports that is really fueled by technology it's amazing without technology honestly the cars wouldn't be anywhere near their what they are today and IT systems go we underpin everything that the company does nobody really wants to say that I t's the lifeblood of the company they don't but we need to be able to deliver and actually let the business actually take on new technologies new techniques and get out the way so we've got a huge amount of work a lot of what Charlie said on stage earlier on I've been having conversations with the guys here about autonomous data centers immutable infrastructure it's critical for us to go out the way and allow business to if they want some new VMs new storage it just happens not not need a person to be in the way make it sound so simple well you one of your primary sensors Lewis Hamilton is currently in in the number one position battery talked to us in third Monaco coming up this weekend introduction of a new hyper soft tire some pretty exciting stuff yeah so the hope of soft tires going to be interesting first race with it before the Monaco track yeah so and they originally designed it for Monaco I believe it will go to another race as well in the short term but we didn't even run it in winter testing earlier in the year so the first time we ran it was actually Barcelona test last week I've actually heard nothing about it so I don't know whether it's good bad or indifferent I don't know what's going to happen but it's going to be an interesting week because it's a very different track to where we've been to so far traditionally some of the other teams are quite strong there so the this weekend's going to be an interesting one to see where we end up Monica is always exciting grace Matt thanks so much for stopping by the cube and sharing with us what you're doing and how you're enabling technology to drive the Sportage no comatose again I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Volante live at pure storage accelerate 2018 we were at the Bill Graham Civic I'm Prince for the day stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest