From Formula 1 to Tier IV: McLaren looks at the datacenter

At the Innovation Forum in Singapore today, Dr. Geoff McGrath, Managing Director of McLaren Applied Technologies (MAT) announced their technology partnership with IO Data Centers focused on developing next generation technologies to build more efficient datacenters.

Anyone familiar with the automotive world is well acquainted with McLaren, be it from their Formula One racing to their exotic street cars (who coincidentally launched a new website today, which can be found at www.mclaren.com). But McLaren is hardly a name associated with any form of datacenter technology. Until today.

To those who understand how technology driven Formula 1 racing is today, this won't seem like too much of a reach. Current cars in the series have gone well beyond simple dynamic systems management with every team backed up by a trailer full of high-performance computer equipment and heavily instrumented cars who's behavior on the track can be documented, and in some cases modified on the fly. So dealing with improving efficencies and modeling current and future behavior from instrumented results is something with which McLaren has a lot of experience.

This makes them a good fit with IO, who has differentiated themselves from the datacenter provider pack with their heavily instrumented modular datacenters. In fact, when I spoke with Kevin Malik, CIO and General Manager IO Labs, IO Datacenters, he told me that they currently collect over 2 billion datapoints a month from their instrumented datacenters, which is certainly data that can be used to model and examine how energy is being used within their modules with great accuracy, provided the competence to do this kind of modeling can be found.

Which is certainly a strength of MAT, and as Kevin told me, a fresh set of eyes with a non-datacenter-centric look at the data and the level of expertise that MAT brings to understanding this kind of data can be expected to bring advantages that the traditional datacenter tools provider may not be able to see.

IO expects to begin to see the benefits of the new technology partnership over the next year as they build the next generatiomns of their own DCIM tools.