Specialising in bespoke and advanced trackside data solutions, here at Oper8 Global Group, we understand every second counts in Formula 1.

Trackside IT is fundamental in race communication, data management and is essential to daily operations. An industry where latency, telemetries and data are more than critical components to performance, it’s imperative that the trackside infrastructure that you choose can process and manage data with efficiency and security as a top priority.

At Oper8 Global Group, we believe the best solutions are the ones built specifically for you. That’s why every solution we deliver is fully customisable and carefully tailored to you and your team’s exact requirements, from IT loads and rack dimensions to power specifications.

Our focus is simple: providing a solution that fits perfectly and can be adapted to grow alongside your team for long‑term success.

Join us as we explore the importance of trackside IT and reveal how our bespoke solutions enable industry‑leading performance.

Our Customisable Oper8 Trackside Solution

Technical and Environmental Challenges

With Formula 1 race weekends taking place across the globe, teams face a wide range of environmental challenges that are traditionally far from suitable for IT compute. Fluctuating temperatures, high humidity and demanding garage conditions (where 1,000bhp+ engines generate extreme heat, carbon emissions and airborne brake dust) create a harsh environment for IT infrastructure.

At the same time, budget cap regulations place greater emphasis on maximising the lifespan and reliability of IT computing systems.

In an environment as demanding as Formula 1, at Oper8 Global Group we understand the importance of IT infrastructure being able to deliver exceptional robustness, resilience and performance, ensuring mission‑critical systems run at peak efficiency at all times.

The Critical Functions of Trackside Infrastructure

In Formula 1, seamless IT infrastructure underpins everything from trackside deployment to split‑second decision‑making. Let’s explore the key reasons why trackside IT plays such a vital role in driving performance and success.

Real-time telemetry – To maximise car performance and support mission‑critical data processing during split‑second race decisions, trackside data solutions must deliver the highest levels of responsiveness and efficiency.

Communication – Effective trackside communication is critical, providing dependable connectivity between the pit wall, garage and race control to support precise, coordinated and efficient race operations.

Security – Secure data management is essential to protecting valuable IP and sensitive race data, while ensuring seamless accessibility for trackside operations.

Our Customisable Oper8 Trackside Solution

Our Trackside Solutions

Tailored to your team’s exact requirements, here at Oper8 Global Group, our in‑house design experts take the time to understand your needs, developing a custom-fit solution engineered for success. With options for bespoke branding, our recently launched second‑generation IT ECO System delivers innovative technology, designed to enhance industry-leading performance and reliability.

But what truly sets our solution apart? Let’s uncover the difference:

Hermetically sealed ecosystems – Designed for demanding environments, our advanced sealing technology prevents dust, contaminants and foreign matter from entering compute racks, maximising performance and prolonging IT hardware lifespan.

Closed-loop cooling – With quick‑connect hoses for fast installation, our advanced cooling techniques ensure efficient hot and cold air separation, eliminating heat discharge into the garage and protecting performance‑critical environments.

Redundant power & cooling systems – Our trackside solution integrates fully redundant power and cooling, combining UPS‑protected clean power, battery back up in the event of power failure (with change over facility for generator back up) and 2N power and cooling redundancy to ensure uninterrupted operation.

Air freight optimisation – Our solutions have the option to be designed with custom rack heights and are export‑packed for safe transport, featuring lockable castor wheels with levelling feet and quick‑connect bay kits for the most effective deployment.

Shock protection – We install shock mounts within racks to ensure that sensitive equipment has an added layer of protection during transportation.

Smart connectivity – For efficient deployment and added protection, our designs include pre‑wired Neutrik panels to speed up rack connections and recessed doors that safeguard wireless access points.

Real-time monitoring – With real‑time fault reporting and round‑the‑clock 24/7/365 NOC support, our monitoring systems ensure your hardware consistently operates within critical performance thresholds.

With over 35 years of industry experience and a deep-rooted understanding of F1 trackside demands, here at Oper8 Global Group, we are passionate about delivering solutions that are the perfect fit for you and your team. By maximising the lifespan and dependability of your IT hardware, our team removes technology distractions, keeping your focus firmly on race performance and success.

Get in touch with our trackside specialists to discover how we can bring your bespoke data centre solution to life.

From the CTO’s corner: Simon Gardner, Oper8 Global Group

For anyone who has had teenage kids, you can probably relate to the messy bedroom. While it’s usually a source of frustration to most parents, for some kids it’s a matter of pride – to the extent it’s become a TikTok trend!

Odd start – what’s that all got to do with data centres?

The impact of a dirty room is more than just being unsightly. It can create stress, interfere with your ability to concentrate, and interrupt your sleep. Put a technology overlay on that, and there are a lot of similarities with a dirty data centre.

Microscopic dust and debris are a data centre’s enemy, compromising performance, increasing energy consumption, clogging fans, causing greater wear and tear on equipment, and even leading to downtime. That can jeopardise any operational targets, particularly uptime, but also if you have set yourself sustainability or net zero goals.

Design for clean

Measures to keep your data centre clean need to start already at the design stages.

Think about where you can or need to deploy components (or all) of the data centre with an IP66 (ingress protection) rating. An IP66 rating means your facility is dust proof and water proof, ideal for harsh environments, but also the perfect start to minimising any dirt making it inside. You can also design to other higher or lower IP ratings depending on your requirements.

To achieve an IP66 rating, micro, modular or prefabricated complete units make that job easier with the build and testing all taking place in the factory before shipping to site. You just need to include other tools to keep dirt out when the door is opened, like bursts of air to blow particles away and sticky mats to capture dirt or dust on shoes.

Your choice of cooling methods is also a factor. Immersion or direct-to-chip cooling reduces  the need for air cooling albeit storage and network devices still require this, which moves dust around the facility. In addition, as a closed system, liquid cooling is less likely to introduce external contaminants than air-cooled systems. One thing you do have to consider with immersion cooling, however, is how you clean off residual dielectric liquids from components without damaging them when you need to service or upgrade your servers. 

Once you get to the build stage – either preparing the site before installing your prefab unit or constructing your data centre entirely on-site – maintaining good building practices is one thing, but the process can’t avoid creating some dust and debris.

Navigating from build to operation

After construction, a meticulous clean to reach your required ISO 14644-1:2015 air cleanliness classification is essential, targeting all surfaces, above-floor, sub-floor, overhead voids, hardware exteriors, HVAC systems and touch points. That ensures a pristine environment before you install and commission your equipment.

From that point on, to maintain a clean facility you need to establish regular cleaning schedules and also environmental monitoring, particularly indoor air quality (IAQ) sensors to alert you to any unexpected increase in particulate matter and pollutants in the air, along with temperature, humidity, and CO2 levels. That means you can investigate either a leak or breach of your dustproofing measures, or some problem with your air filtration and HVAC systems.

I mentioned earlier that a dirty data centre can jeopardise operational targets, like sustainability of net zero goals, and the impact of increasing particulate and pollutant levels could be quite subtle and difficult to identify. Data from these environmental sensors becomes important over time in tracking and analysing the impact that changes in cleanliness levels has on energy consumption. It’s an old reference, but it’s something Google did by taking historical data from thousands of sensors and using it to train deep neural networks to improve its data centre energy efficiency.

Your IAQ sensors are also valuable in assessing the effectiveness of any scheduled cleans. You should have a series of recommended cleaning activities you undertake daily through to annually. The outcome of these cleans should be reflected in improvements in air quality. If you aren’t achieving the expected uptick after a specific clean, then that’s the time to either review your cleaning practices or get a new cleaner!

Ultimately, keeping your data centre clean is about constant vigilance and constant maintenance. Circling back to where we started, Understanding Teenagers tells us that while cleaning and maintaining their rooms are not amongst their priorities, teenagers should be facing up to their responsibilities and learning to maintain their living space in order.

It’s no different for data centre operators. Cleaning has to be a non-discretionary expense and regime as it is necessary to maintain uptime and energy efficiency, critical metrics for your data centre.

From the CTO’s corner: Simon Gardner, Oper8 Global Group

You’d have to be living under a rock if you didn’t know that cybersecurity threats have ramped up this year, with a seemingly endless number of attacks and a proliferation of tools, technologies and methods available to malicious actors around the globe.

The good news is that thanks to widespread media reporting, we’re also a lot more aware of the risks out there. A few years ago, if you asked the average person on the street about phishing attacks, the answer would have been a blank stare; now, more than likely they will tell you all about it, and probably explain vishing to you as well.

According to the leading cybersecurity predictions, the threat landscape is only getting worse, with 2026 likely to see the accelerating influence of AI, the growing maturity of tactics like ransomware and supply chain attacks, and the expectation that quantum computing will soon break current encryption standards.

So, what’s my point?

With the current media focus and attention on remote or digitally based threats and risks, we can’t be distracted and take our eye off physical security – especially in the data centre – because cyber and physical security are intrinsically linked in terms of both threat and response.

In the mass transformation of businesses into digital enterprises, our physical computing facilities have never been more critical to our ongoing operations and viability. Take out a data centre or server room, and parts (if not all) of your business stop running. That could lead to anything from loss of reputation or revenue to loss of lives.

Worryingly, the UK’s National Protection Security Authority (NPSA) believes that a lot of data centres are lacking sufficient physical security. In security planning guidance it published last month, the NPSA outlines that physical security needs to be factored in as one of the five core elements of holistic security planning.

According to the NPSA, technical components to physical security relate to access control; visual surveillance systems; perimeter security; and intruder detection systems. I’ll take you through each in turn and their importance in the overall make-up of your data centre facilities.

Access control

The NPSA defines access control systems as the first point of challenge, representing the boundaries between private and public areas. However, it’s a little more nuanced than that. If we are referring to stand-alone data centre facilities, that private/public separation is applicable, but you also need to consider server rooms or a micro or modular data centre located in an office or inside a larger secured facility that might not need the same level of control.

The granularity of your door access systems, and also the Security Rating (SR) of the physical doors or access points themselves – from SR1 (requiring minimal tools to break in) all the way up to SR8 – will depend on the data centre’s location and how exposed it is to external access or harm, what you are trying to protect, and your appetite for risk versus the cost of implementing additional security measures.

You will also need robust monitoring tools so that if your access controls are breached, you know about it immediately, and can take steps to respond and minimise or mitigate any damage.

Visual surveillance systems

Your data centre location, risk appetite and the value of what you are trying to protect are applicable to all physical security measures, including visual surveillance systems, or CCTV to use an outdated acronym for convenience!

CCTV is an important deterrent for would-be attackers, but it also offers the first evidence of an attempted breach of a facility, provided the video feeds are being monitored. With the advent of AI-enabled computer vision, the capability that you have to monitor video is changing dramatically. These systems are automatically detecting and alerting security personnel to potential threats or suspicious behaviour, and even being integrated with infrared, thermal, X-ray and CT imaging systems to extend that capability even further.

Perimeter security

CCTV forms part of a broader array of technical perimeter security measures that could also include motion detection systems, alarms and lighting. The goal here is to increase the difficulty and time taken for a would-be attacker to breach the facility, giving more time for you to respond and prevent it.

Perimeter security sensors are also essential for data centre operators to respond rapidly to non-malicious threats or harm, such as a vehicle, or a tree or other debris from a storm, hitting and damaging the facility, or its electricity or networking connections.

Intruder detection systems

These sensors or detectors could form additional measures for the perimeter; or for more sensitive or secure parts within the facility. For example, there might be certain racks or rooms that have more stringent controls based on any number of parameters.

This technology includes switches on doors and windows, vibration detectors in halls or doorways, or volumetric detectors in rooms. Again, this technology could also kick in to alert operators to other forms of potential damage, like earthquakes, which can have a devastating impact on data centres and surrounding infrastructure.

Operational considerations

The wash up to all of this? Physical security can’t be underestimated, but it also shouldn’t be over-engineered. The requirements of a remote mine site in Kenya compared to an office block in London are very different.

It all comes down to designing and implementing what’s right for each scenario and set of operational requirements. It’s what the NPSA refers to as a “risk-based layered approach to security” and using the “3Ds philosophy” – to “Deter, Detect and Delay” the attackers or threat.

Let me know if you’d like to “get physical” and chat further.

From the CTO’s corner: Simon Gardner, Oper8 Global Group

Excuse the pun, but technology developments to manage the thermal demands of data centres are hot right now.

I recently wrote about direct-to-chip (D2C) liquid cooling, but the other big emerging field is immersion cooling. That’s where you mount your servers vertically and immerse them completely into a bath of dielectric fluid. And, just like D2C liquid cooling, you can have both single-phase and two-phase immersion cooling. While I explored the differences between the two methods in my D2C post, given immersion technology is still quite nascent I’ll just tackle the subject as a whole.

Interest in immersion cooling is high for a number of reasons.

Most prominently, it is being driven by the rapid growth in demand for edge computing – where the low latency requirements of AI, ML or IoT applications necessitate processing close to the source. However, these locations could have any number of constraints that make it difficult to deploy data centre infrastructure – power or water availability, space, or hostile environments like manufacturing facilities or mine sites.

Immersion cooling offers a lot of advantages to overcome these edge computing constraints.

These edge AI, ML or IoT applications typically require higher performance and higher density computing, which in turn leads to higher cooling requirements. With lower power requirements and far greater cooling efficiency than traditional methods, immersion cooling has the potential to reduce the overall data centre energy demand by more than 10%. That either allows you to channel more electricity into your computing resources or it makes it more feasible for you to locate your data centre in places where power is more expensive or supply is limited.

It’s a similar story with water. A lifecycle assessment study published in Nature found that blue water consumption was reduced by 31-52% in data centres using advanced cooling methods, such as cold plates and immersion cooling. Reducing both energy and water use is a key step towards net zero data centres.

Enabling higher density computing, as well as doing away with peripheral coolers, chillers, fans and evaporative cooling systems, immersion cooling reduces the amount of floor space you need, which gives you the option either to use more expensive floor space or spend more on other components, given floor space can be a significant proportion of the budget when you are evaluating the economics of a new build. Shell, for one, estimates that immersion cooling can help businesses cut the floor space needed to host their computing equipment by up to 80%.

Immersion cooling is also a perfect way to address the spatial, power and thermal constraints of certain hostile environments. We often see these onboard ships, at remote mine sites or in noisy and dusty manufacturing facilities. I know of one high-performance computing unit being used onboard for subsea mapping for oil rig exploration. In dusty conditions or environments with high particulate matter, immersion cooling provides better environmental isolation, while any form of air cooling will tend to increase the circulation of that dust in your data centre.

With any emerging technology there are also some words of caution.

If you have an existing facility and you want to retrofit it with immersion cooling, you will need to replumb. Given traditional air cooled data centre designs generally do whatever they can to keep liquids out of the data halls, this replumbing could be very extensive and expensive.

Also, we aren’t just dealing with water here, so any plumbing needs to be more than robust. Most dielectric fluids (generally vegetable oils or fluorocarbons) will need special handling, and any leak isn’t just catastrophic for your data centre equipment and its operation, there is also the potential for wider environmental damage plus the costs of any regulatory penalties and the cleanup.

On the issue of cost, the final challenge to designing a data centre using immersion cooling is that the system you deploy may require non-standard equipment and rack configurations to fit into the immersion tanks.

So where do we stand? There are a lot of emerging use cases where immersion liquid cooling can play a key role, and now is the perfect time to start investigating how you can apply it in your own facilities. I’d love to have a chat.

From the CTO’s corner: Simon Gardner, Oper8 Global Group

At the last United Nations General Assembly in New York, world leaders updated their commitments to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets as the world strives to reach net zero by 2050. Those commitments are translating into increased pressure on data centre operators to drive sustainability improvements. That’s because data centres have seen some of the biggest increases in energy demand, largely due to the explosion in AI use.

While data centres accounted for just 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report, consumption has grown by 12% per year since 2017, and that’s set to rise even further. The IEA expects that AI requirements will see data centre electricity consumption growing by 15% per year through to 2030, more than four times faster than the growth of total electricity consumption from all other sectors.

That’s leading to greater regulatory pressures as governments increase financial disincentives to limit energy consumption and emission levels, which in turn is driving more aggressive corporate sustainability targets, increasingly stringent procurement requirements from customers, and greater investor scrutiny of organisation’s environmental credentials – amongst others.

So what does that all mean for data centres? We’re seeing the rise of net zero data centres that are leveraging energy and water efficiency, circularity practices and asset utilisation to minimise their direct and indirect GHG emissions.

We wrote about sustainable data centres recently, but net zero data centres take things one step further, with their goal to achieve an overall balance between GHG emissions produced and GHG emissions taken out of the atmosphere.

The hallmark of these data centres is that they are using advanced power, cooling, management and monitoring solutions; sourcing renewable energy and utilising more battery storage; minimising water use; and employing circular equipment lifecycles.

However, this is all very difficult to achieve. Let’s break that down.

Sourcing renewable energy (or building your own renewable generation and storage capabilities) is currently very expensive, although this cost is dropping as countries increase the ratio of renewable energy in the grid. There’s a great data visualisation of this – albeit from 2022 – showing each country’s renewable power percentage. Figures show that these renewable percentages have increased for most nations in the last three years.

Data centre operators don’t always have the luxury of greenfield sites, so in many cases they are having to retrofit existing facilities that were designed for a completely different operating paradigm. Facilities that have operated successfully for years can’t transform into net zero data centres overnight. We’ve seen that particularly with old telephone exchanges or outdated edge sites that were never designed for that purpose.

One way Oper8 Global Group is addressing these net zero challenges is through our modular and micro data centre designs. For a start, that’s enabling us to more efficiently retrofit existing facilities by deploying the latest hardware without having to refit the entire site with new power and cooling infrastructure. That includes the implementation of more efficient direct-to-chip solutions and other advanced cooling methods.

Building with modular components in the factory before shipping to site means we are far more efficient in the construction process, while minimising waste. By building in our factory, we have  a controlled and measurable environment, and we are taking steps to improve our own sustainability.

In the factory we can run tests on the completed units, either to ensure we can meet expected performance targets before the data centre is commissioned, or to provide accurate benchmarks so that operators can plan in advance what they need to offset to achieve net zero outcomes.

Taking a modular approach also allows us to maximise the reuse of components, aligning with data centre operators’ circulatory practices. For our micro data centres, it’s possible to reuse almost everything, either by redeploying the complete unit to a new site or by repurposing the components in another micro, prefabricated or modular DC. It’s more difficult to reuse the frames and wall panels in our modular DCs because they are custom designed and installed, but most of the internal components can be redeployed.

So how seriously should we plan for net zero data centres? The reality is that, as an industry, we need to be a lot more rigorous in understanding both holistically and incrementally the environmental impact from building and operating our data centres, because there will be numerous sustainability expectations or obligations that we will need to meet now and in the future.

We also need to be aware that the immediate demand for AI threatens to overwhelm our non-renewable resources if we don’t take steps now to alleviate that impact.

That said, there is a silver lining in all of this. There are more efficient AI training and inference models being developed, and AI as a technology is itself enabling more sustainable practices – both in the data centre directly and in the wider world. For example, in a recent article ‘Could net-zero AI become a reality?’, PwC cites how AI can be applied to predict when rooms will get hot and automatically pre-cool them. In a broader application, PwC points to AI optimising the routes of commercial aircraft and cargo ships; and refining the composition of cement and the processes used to make it.

Taking all this into account, as a data centre operator, if we can measure and quantify the environmental benefit being generated in a broader context by the AI applications we are enabling, we can potentially use this to offset the environmental impact of our data centre.

It’s all food for thought. Contact me if you’d like to discuss further.