In late April I was lucky enough to visit AT&T’s GNOC, or Global Network Operations Centre. If you’ve not been there, I recommend you find a reason why you simply must visit. As the name suggests, it is the place from which AT&T control their global network and it is one of the most impressive sights I have seen. The heart of the place is a huge room dominated by a curved wall on which there are 147 screens (it was clearly designed by a snooker fan). The screens contain all sorts of data about the health and usage of the AT&T network. One screen shows the expected level of traffic for the day in question, and the actual traffic being experienced. It turns out that we are all creatures of habit and so they predict accurately how much traffic they will have to carry and so any deviation from the prediction is cause for investigation. The busiest day of the year? Mothers Day!
Across 12 of the screens is a large map of the world, mostly blank. This tells the operators when there is a problem on the network. In the 20 minutes or so that I watched this screen, a line appeared between a point in Central Europe and another in South Africa showing that there was an issue with this connection. Nobody panicked, and after a few minutes of activity the line was removed. Another then came up between the Iberian Peninsular and South America and disappeared again just as quickly. The whole place was clocked in an atmosphere of calm and reassured me that they are in control.
I had another treat in May when I went to Monaco for the Grand Prix. Although this is my eighth season working with Williams it is actually the first year that I have attended this prestigious event. It was a great privilege to be able to walk around this famous street circuit and to see just how narrow it is and how tight the corners are, including the Lowes hairpin, which is the tightest corner on the Formula 1 calendar; it is so different to other corners that we actually have to modify our front suspension and steering to give the cars extra steering lock so that they can get round it safely.
Two things struck me about Monaco that I had not picked up from the television coverage. The first was the elevation change; the cars have to climb a steep hill through the first few corners and then return to sea level at the exit of the tunnel. The second was the noise; our cars are pretty noisy at the best of times and the geography at Monaco, with buildings and rock faces climbing up from the track on the land side, reflect and amplify the sound waves to create a deafening, eerie whine from the cars on the circuit – fantastic!
This same geography makes Monaco the most demanding place for our Race Team. The area for the garages is very small and so we can only keep the minimum amount of equipment in the garage. There is enough space to stock the essential equipment which is required to work on the cars, but the trucks and spare stock that we usually have behind the garage at other European Grands Prix, have to be kept at a remote storage area. Our team then have to hand carry spare parts and tooling to the garage when required. This also adds an extra level of complexity to our network infrastructure as all areas that we occupy have to be connected to each other and then connected to the AT&T MPLS network to give us the ability to transmit valuable car data back to our headquarters in the UK. As usual, AT&T were up for the extra challenge and our systems all worked flawlessly.
One innovation for us this year is that we have been running Voice over IP over this extended network. To allow us to run VoIP, AT&T have implemented Class of Service over our network connection so that the voice connections do not get contended with the flows of data over the network. I can now be at my desk in the UK and use an internal extension number to talk to our Race Team Manager when he is at the track, which may be thousands of miles away. This is reducing our calls to mobiles and the expensive roaming charges that we can incur when staff are abroad.
On the track, we are now a third of the way through the 2009 formula 1 season and it is turning out to be an exciting one. Brawn GP have been very dominant, but other teams are starting to narrow the gap to them and reduce the margin that they have. AT&T Williams is no exception and we are pleased to have had a strong showing in the last couple of races. We are looking forward to carrying this momentum into our home race at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on June 21st.
Alex Burns
10 June 2009
