How Aston Martin is harnessing high performance networking

The name Aston Martin conjures images of old-world luxury coupled with high performance. So when it comes to meeting the challenges of the digital age, this iconic British car manufacturer has similar expectations of its networking infrastructure.

According to Aston Martin’s network architect Darryl Alder, his company’s greater use of digital processes and implementation of a cloud-first strategy has created new requirements for its network.

“You often hear about James Bond and the DB5 and all the classic vehicles,” Alder said. “However, that doesn't mean that we don't have to compete in a modern market. Digital technology helps us with the modern competition in the automotive industry.”

One of the key requirements for Aston Martin is to ensure its manufacturing processes run smoothly, which requires highly available network infrastructure with very low latency. This need led to the company upgrading its switching architecture to Juniper.

Alder says that one of Juniper’s key attractions was the high level of automation that it brought to network management.

“We're a very small team, we can't be bogged down with complexity in our network,” Alder said. “The other good thing about Juniper is that it lends itself to automation and network programmability.”

Aston Martin has subsequently selected Juniper as the basis for its new wireless environment, in part to take advantage of Juniper’s Mist AI management platform.

“The Mist AI helps us with a lot of the wireless radio resource management, but it also helps us with something called Wired Assurance,” Alder said. “We've got quite an established wired connectivity estate, so the Mist platform can provide a single pane of glass.”

Alder says this will also assist the productivity of workers across the business.

“One of my visions is that the end users shouldn't really care about the difference between wired and wireless, they should just be able to work,” he said.