An interesting story popped up on the Microsoft newsfeeds today. Microsoft entered into a partnership with McLaren Electronic Systems to compete for a contract to supply monitoring systems in Forumla 1 racing cars. Anyone familiar with F1 will know that the cars generate performance and racing metrics that are transmitted back to a central station when they pass the pits (via radio) and when they are back in the garage (via cable). In the past, CA Unicenter was used by McLaren. Despite this, they still own some world championships.
The MS Press story mentions that Windows Vista, Office 2007 and SQL Server 2005 will be used to gather and utilise the 1Gb of data that is gathered per car in every race, not to mention the countless practice laps that happen in the off season and at the factory on rigs. I would be surprise if System Center Operations Manager 2007 (MOM 2007) isn’t being used. It’s architecture would be perfect for this.
I wonder how long it will take the Penguin lovers (Linux) and MOM competitors to break out stories about there beign more crashes in F1 in 2008.