McLaren and NTT Com to deploy new SDx technology at the Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix 2018

TOKYO, JAPAN — McLaren Formula 1 (F1) Team and its technology partner NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group (TYO:9432), announced today plans to launch on October 5 a new software-defined-everything (SDx) technology on a temporary basis for deployment during the F1 Japanese Grand Prix 2018. The "Suzuka Special" network will speed up trackside communication for faster, more flexible in-race strategizing, including cloud-based telemetry data analysis, a key to successful F1 racing. The network will be deployed at Suzuka Circuit, Japan and the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, UK as well as in the team's cloud infrastructure network in Europe.

New NFV infrastructure and uCPE for faster, more flexible network

The new network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructure will comprise a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), WAN accelerator, unified threat management (UTM) and web proxy. The virtualized network functions will be connected with service-chaining technology for fast, flexible network settings. Also, NTT Com will deploy universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) at both Suzuka Circuit and the McLaren Technology Centre by utilizing a white-box CPE base, which will facilitate flexible installation of required software. NFV infrastructure, namely UTM, web proxy and uCPE, including SD-WAN and WAN accelerator software installed in the white-box CPE, will be used to establish an Internet gateway and SD-WAN at the F1 race track for an extra-fast network for solving network latency.

Optimized routing via Microsoft cloud infrastructure

When a public cloud is connected via the Internet and passes through multiple ISPs, ISPs farthest from the cloud infrastructure typically slow the network and lower performance quality. The Suzuka Special network, however, will optimize direct routing to Microsoft's Azure and Office 365 by connecting the NFV infrastructure and Microsoft's cloud network, bypassing the Internet. Consequently, the McLaren garage at Suzuka Circuit will have high-speed, route-optimized connection to the cloud. In addition, the NFV infrastructure and uCPE will benefit from high-speed connection to a multi-cloud, including NTT Com's Enterprise Cloud, a hybrid cloud environment supporting traditional and cloud-native ICT for highly secure and stable operations with designed-in flexibility and agility.