EMC storage will support British America’s Cup effort

EMC Corporation will be the official IT storage supplier for Land Rover BAR, the British team conceived by Sir Ben Ainslie to win the America’s Cup and bring it home to Britain for the first time in its 167 year history.

Through the use of EMC technology, race and testing data will be consolidated rapidly to ensure that the Land Rover BAR teams around the world are able to run real-time analysis, instead of waiting until the following morning for information to be ready.

With two operating bases, the EMC Mission Control centre in Portsmouth and a second in development at the America’s Cup venue in Bermuda, plus a mobile centre travelling worldwide to the preliminary events, Land Rover BAR will have all of its data continuously replicated between the three sites.

As a result, the Land Rover BAR team in Portsmouth will be able to analyse race and testing data from around the world immediately, allowing them to identify and make improvements right up to and through the finals in June 2017. As a result, the design team and crew will be able to adapt much faster.

Sir Ben Ainslie, team principal and skipper at Land Rover BAR, said: “Our primary goal at Land Rover BAR is to win the America’s Cup, and we are focussed on making the boat go faster. The ability to have all of our experts – wherever they are in the world – quickly analyse our testing and race data is a key part of achieving that.

“EMC’s immense heritage in helping companies squeeze every ounce of value out of their data will make us more competitive.”

To support the telemetry data being collected, high definition video from eight cameras will enable more in-depth analysis of the boat in action. All of this data will be stored and accessed for analysis using EMC’s recently launched VCE VxRail Appliance, which is fully integrated next generation VMware hyper-converged infrastructure.

“Harnessing this data will play a significant role in the development of both the boat and team. EMC will ensure that it can be rapidly accessed by the whole organisation without interruption, throughout the campaign. We look forward to being part of their journey,” said Ross Fraser, managing director, UK&I, EMC.

Sir Ben has previously raced for the Oracle America’s Cup team.

@AntonySavvas