Data Archiving, Availability, Data Protection, Systems Management, Green IT

Executive Summary

Overview
Renault F1 is the Formula One racing team of French automaker Renault S.A. Drawing on a heritage of motorsport innovation that stretches back to Renault’s first Formula One race in 1977, the Renault F1 Team was born following the automaker’s acquisition of Benetton Racing in 2000, which became Renault F1 in 2002. The team notched a historic double-double achievement by winning the drivers’ and constructors’ championships in both the 2005 and 2006 racing seasons. A key element of the Renault F1 Team’s behind-the-scenes race strategy is to improve overall efficiency and responsiveness by creating the best information technology (IT) infrastructure possible.

Barriers
Prior to becoming the Renault F1 Team, the IT organization at Benetton was focused primarily on maintaining the organization’s manufacturing, computer-aided design (CAD) systems, and UNIXbased workstations. The newly born Renault F1 Team was determined to win the FIA Formula One World Championship with a 100 percent Renault car and found a strategic partner in IT to provide infrastructure support for everything from design and manufacturing to testing, telemetry, and car performance during races. As information technologies evolved and became more intertwined with the business of winning races, the Renault F1 Team’s data center environment grew in size, complexity, and total cost of ownership. Growth and complexity also brought challenges in the areas of performance, availability, and storage; operational efficiency and productivity; email infrastructure and messaging security; and IT risk exposure.

The Solution
With a World Championship as its goal, the Renault F1 Team looked to expand the role of information technologies in helping achieve peak racing performance. Over the span of a decade, the Renault F1 Team leveraged a series of data security, availability, and systems management solutions from Symantec. Starting with standardized data backup and recovery on Symantec NetBackup in 1997, the team subsequently implemented a comprehensive portfolio of solutions in the areas of archiving (Symantec Enterprise Vault), high availability (Veritas Cluster Server), data security (Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec DeepSight Alert Services), messaging security (Symantec Brightmail Gateway and MessageLabs Hosted Email Security), and IT compliance (Symantec Control Compliance Suite). In addition, the Renault F1 Team leverages Symantec Business Critical Services as a strategic advisor for technology upgrades and refreshes.

Benefits
By standardizing on a comprehensive portfolio of data security, availability, and systems management solutions from Symantec, the Renault F1 Team has realized substantial business value. Alchemy Group conducted a Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis and quantified realized business value in the following areas (all savings are expressed in U.S. dollars1):

• Backup Labor Productivity and Media Savings: $308,687 in labor productivity savings and tape media cost savings associated with data backup and recovery from January 2005 through December 2009
• Email Storage Cost Avoidance and Labor Savings: $49,131 in storage savings with data compression, single-instance archiving, and the elimination of email file restores from January 2005 through December 2009
• Storage Space and Productivity Savings: $1,543,662 in data storage space saved and IT and end-user productivity gains from removal of spam email from January 2005 through
December 2009
• Server Cost and Labor Savings: $584,578 in hardware cost savings and $1,610,927 in reduced IT and end-user downtime through server outage prevention with enhanced clustering from January 2004 through December 2009
• Issue Resolution IT Labor Productivity Savings: $22,054 saved through reduction of number of high-severity-level business critical issues from January 2005 through December 2009
• Green Energy Savings: $107,125 in total server energy cost avoidance related to storage reductions through clustering, email data compression, and spam avoidance from January 2004 through December 2009