Can a fast network make your business more sustainable? It does for SailGP

With eight of the world’s fastest catamarans racing head-to-head at nearly 60 mph, speed and skill top the list of what fans love about the SailGP racing league. But the stunning race locations—from Saint-Tropez, France, to Christchurch, New Zealand, from Singapore to Chicago’s freshwater coast—run a close second.

Traveling to these locales has been costly—and at odds with the league’s goal of steadily lowering the competition’s carbon footprint. Indeed, it used to require packing in and out more than 20 shipping containers full of tech gear for the television broadcast alone.

Today, SailGP brings just one container of broadcast gear—thanks to moving TV production to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

It’s a different kind of speed that made this cloud transition possible—an Oracle FastConnect network, which can zip race video from the shoreline to an England TV studio in less than 300 milliseconds, via Oracle’s London cloud region. “It’s in the blink of an eye,” says Warren Jones, SailGP chief technology officer.

Oracle FastConnect is a dedicated network connection that organizations can buy at increments of 1-, 10-, and 100-gigabit-per-second speeds. Users pay per hour for the service, and Oracle does not charge egress fees—additional fees for moving data in and out of OCI.

FastConnect gives organizations like SailGP three key benefits: low data latency, which helps ensure users of an application (such as sailing broadcast watchers) don’t see lags; security, because every connection is dedicated to a single customer; and predictability, since dedicated bandwidth provides consistent performance, unlike the public internet where a surge in bandwidth demand could slow your application.

OCI has 37 cloud regions around the world that offer FastConnect services. Oracle also has more than 70 partners that provide links to the service. “There’s a good chance wherever you are in the world that there’s an Oracle cloud region or a partner there,” says Yogesh Kaushik, Oracle vice president of product management for network services.

Because SailGP has a goal to become the world’s most sustainable sports and entertainment entity, using OCI means not only moving fewer shipping containers around the world, but also transporting fewer people to sites to run broadcast operations. Today, 100% of OCI data centers in Europe run on renewable energy—and Oracle is aiming to run entirely on renewable energy by 2025.

For SailGP, shifting to OCI using FastConnect is typical of how Jones is pushing technology to meet the league’s demanding and always rising standards.

“We want to get better, we want to be more efficient with what we do,” Jones says. “And we want technology to help us do that.”

Photography: Bob Martin for SailGP