Luxury Brand, Aston Martin Lagonda, Simplifies IT Ops | Juniper Global Summit

0:00 [music]

0:07 -Hello everyone.

0:08 My name is James Morgan.

0:09 I'm the vice president of Enterprise Sales here at Juniper Networks.

0:12 I'm delighted that today joining me is Darryl Alder,

0:16 who's the Network Architect at Aston Martin Lagonda.

0:19 Darryl, our two companies have got a very similar approach to innovation,

0:23 continually pushing the boundaries to deliver true competitive advantage

0:27 to our customers through engineering excellence and simplicity.

0:30 Aston Martin is already a well-established Juniper customer

0:32 with deployments across its major manufacturing,

0:35 administration, and customer-facing sites.

0:38 Darryl, welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

0:41 -Great. Thank you.

0:43 -To kick things off, maybe could you give me an overview

0:46 of Aston Martin and your role in particular?

0:48 -Sure. Absolutely.

0:50 Well, thanks for having me.

0:52 My role at Aston Martin is as a network architect.

0:55 I'm responsible for all of the internal connectivity, both wired and wireless.

1:02 That's all servers, devices, end-users, that kind of thing.

1:07 I look after the LAN and the WAN side as well,

1:11 obviously, all of the geographic sites

1:14 and all the campus connections as well.

1:17 My role involves being the technical lead for the network team,

1:21 so a point of escalation that's monitoring the junior engineers.

1:26 Also, advising senior management on new networking technologies,

1:31 strategies, and how that's suitable for Aston Martin going forward.

1:37 -Our mission is all around, "Experience-First Networking." Can you explain?

1:42 Just take a minute or two as to how you're delivering

1:45 an exceptional experience for the business and its users?

1:49 -Sure. No worries.

1:51 The complexities of the network, and in fact, IT in general,

1:54 it needs to be somewhat hidden from the end-users.

1:57 At the end of the day, we're not an IT company.

2:00 Aston Martin is all about luxury automotive.

2:03 The more we can detach that complexity from end-users,

2:08 the more focused and productive they can be

2:10 on their day-to-day jobs.

2:14 The data centers we have, for example,

2:17 we plan to make greater use of them.

2:19 Ultimately the end-users don't need to know how a data center works,

2:23 they just need to know that their application is available,

2:26 it's fast, and it just works.

2:29 There's that really. It's just detached in a way from that

2:33 so that they can experience the connectivity,

2:36 experience the network as a facilitator then to their end game.

2:41 -Sure. Of course, during 2020, which was an incredibly difficult year

2:47 for individuals and businesses alike.

2:51 Can you maybe give some examples

2:54 as to how you were able to fundamentally

2:57 make things work and pivot to that kind of

3:00 what was the new environment that many are calling,

3:03 "The current environment and the ongoing one?"

3:06 -Sure. No worries.

3:09 IT is all about problem-solving.

3:12 Whilst the business it's generally not been an offsite style of business,

3:18 obviously, you can't build a car from home,

3:21 the general culture at Aston Martin has been working within an office.

3:26 However, IT themselves have always had technical ability to work remotely.

3:33 To give you an example,

3:34 changes out of hours needs to be done to lessen the impact on production.

3:41 IT staff, have always had the ability to dial in

3:45 whether that's VPN or site-to-site VPN connection or whatever.

3:49 IT has always had that technical ability.

3:52 When we went into the new way of working,

3:56 when everyone started working from home,

3:58 it was fairly trivial just to scale that up for all the end-users,

4:02 because we already have that baseline in place.

4:06 We could just turn up the tap really, and expand that to all users.

4:10 I think it was a little bit of a culture shift

4:13 for a lot of end-users that just weren't used to that,

4:16 maybe just not so much the technical side of it,

4:20 but the workflow, the work process.

4:25 If you've been working in the office for a long time,

4:28 you're used to things set up in a certain way.

4:32 For example, if the finance department had

4:36 an end-of-month's process that they run,

4:38 but they have to go through a VPN first,

4:41 there was just that little extra hop that they would have to work through.

4:45 In the beginning, it was quite tricky,

4:47 but it was only because it was the first time we saw a process,

4:51 the first end of month, the first end of quarter, that sort of thing.

4:55 Now we're about a year on, it's just not that new anymore,

5:00 so people get it now.

5:04 It's been challenging, but that's what we're here for at the end of the day.

5:10 -Yes, absolutely.

5:11 That's the case of transforming

5:14 and pivoting to that environment and that scenario.

5:18 How would you classify where you are in your networking journey

5:22 with Juniper in particular, of course,

5:24 and what your plans are going forward and what that will look like?

5:29 -Right.

5:31 Local switching at each site is based on the Juniper platform.

5:35 We use the EX4300s.

5:38 There's absolutely no plans to change that right now.

5:40 It absolutely suits us perfectly.

5:43 The key for us is the scalability that that platform offers.

5:48 We very often get projects that either expand or contract

5:52 and we don't get that much notice either.

5:56 Where we thought a site might house 10 users, it's suddenly 20 or 30 or 40.

6:02 Suddenly, it scales up.

6:04 That platforms great for that sort of thing,

6:07 just scaling up and back down again.

6:10 Not only the scalability,

6:11 I think the unified codebase, the unified configuration.

6:16 I've often said we're a very small team

6:19 to have that ability of transferring configurations

6:23 between sites, between platforms.

6:25 Well, not even platforms because it's only a single platform.

6:29 To take a configuration template, for example,

6:32 and deploy those is relatively straightforward.

6:36 That's key for us.

6:39 The other thing for Juniper and our journey is wireless,

6:44 is becoming absolutely business-critical.

6:46 I think there was a time 5, 10 years ago when wireless was nice to have,

6:53 unfortunately, that's just not the case now.

6:55 An outage in wireless or even integrated service

6:59 is absolutely impacting.

7:00 It has huge impacts for the business.

7:03 It can stop production,

7:06 or it can seriously degrade certain targets.

7:12 The current wireless system that we have it's okay.

7:16 It works, but it doesn't really provide the insights and the analytics

7:20 to be able to say, "Oh, okay, we've got a potential problem here.

7:25 How about we start moving things around a little bit,

7:28 start deploying may be an access point here, or moving it around."

7:32 We just don't have that analytics right now,

7:34 and so, some of the cloud-based controllers that are coming out.

7:39 It make sense.

7:41 It reduces that site dependency,

7:43 moves the controllers away from that complexity.

7:48 It just makes sense for the business really.

7:51 -Yes, absolutely.

7:52 Customers tell me time and time again actually the operational

7:58 challenges that Wi-Fi present, it's a major headache.

8:03 Especially in certain environments,

8:06 manufacturing being a key one, of course,

8:08 where a cloud-based controller with that analytics

8:12 and telemetry really is a bit of a game-changer.

8:15 Having said that, what plans do you have for Mist

8:19 and the AI platform that provides across our enterprise portfolio?

8:25 -Yes, we're investigating that literally, as we speak.

8:29 Just a few weeks ago,

8:30 I had delivered a couple of the Mist wireless access points

8:34 to trial out actually.

8:37 We really like the look of the insights,

8:41 especially things like guest users, temporary contractors,

8:46 maybe people that aren't full-time Aston Martin permanent staff.

8:50 We've got a lot of visitors coming and going in all of our sites, really.

8:54 To have that analytics there to see where people are going,

8:59 what they're doing, what they need access to,

9:01 that is really quite exciting for us.

9:07 To give you an example,

9:08 lunchtimes then in the main factories in Gaydon and Saint Athan,

9:13 a lot of the technicians need to finish at a very specific time

9:17 because otherwise, the production is a bit fragmented.

9:21 We have scenarios where the restaurants are highly populated one minute

9:28 and then nothing the next.

9:29 If we can maybe look at some of the location analytics,

9:33 privacy aside,

9:35 but just looking at the population density of certain locations,

9:39 if we can have some real-time information on that,

9:42 it could really help us

9:45 drive how the production runs break times, for example,

9:49 or potentially splitting up break times, that sort of thing.

9:52 It's just one small example.

9:54 With the social distancing and things that are going on now,

9:58 I think not just IT, but a lot of areas of the business

10:02 like production, even security, they can make use of the analytics.

10:06 It's really exciting times for us.

10:08 -Yes, absolutely.

10:09 That's quite for the Juniper colleagues listening.

10:13 We often think allocation by services in a certain vertical that would make sense,

10:17 but actually, it'll run across the spectrum

10:20 as we move into this world of post-COVID and the lockdown.

10:25 -You mentioned earlier about a small team as a common theme

10:29 as well among customers I talk to

10:30 is having to do more with less results to an extent.

10:34 In particular, how are you leveraging automation

10:37 and some of the benefits that can bring?

10:40 -We're starting to use automation techniques such as infrastructure's code

10:45 taking the concept beyond static templates.

10:49 Historically you would have a switch that is based on a template.

10:55 Rather than having one big config

10:57 and you cut and paste them and highlight the bits you want to change

11:01 and copy and paste that,

11:03 we're looking at configuration snippets then.

11:07 If you want to change the NTP server, for example,

11:11 it's just a very small piece of code that's held in one place.

11:14 It's version-controlled.

11:16 If we change it, we deploy that to all of the devices in one hit.

11:21 I think we've got about 167 or so switches now.

11:25 If I was to change the NTP server, yes, I could change the template,

11:29 but I still got to roll that out to everything.

11:31 It's still one big template changed.

11:33 If we can take the config snippet and say,

11:36 "Okay, Here is my one piece of code and it's just one line,

11:40 Share system services NTP server."

11:43 If I can change that in just one place

11:45 like I said it's all version-controlled and off we go, perfect.

11:49 That's a good idea of what we're trying to achieve.

11:54 It's, just one small example

11:55 that we're looking at of the other bits and pieces.

11:59 The main challenge though is actually the culture shift.

12:03 It's coming, but there's always that temptation to say,

12:06 "Oh, okay, we've got a specific problem.

12:09 We buy tech products to then solve that problem,"

12:13 where in actual fact we've got the technology there already.

12:16 The Junos operating system is great for automation.

12:21 The XML Base output from some of the RPCs, I won't get too technical,

12:26 but it absolutely lends itself to scripting,

12:29 to automation, to even driven operational scripts, that sort of thing.

12:35 It's coming slowly but automation we need to do automation for the right reasons.

12:41 If we don't, you can very quickly fix the network with automation,

12:46 on the other hand, you can quickly destroy the network with automation.

12:50 We're just making sure we're using the automation

12:52 for the right reasons and in the right scenarios.

12:55 Yes, it's coming.

12:56 We're doing really well.

12:58 -Absolutely and actually, you've inadvertently done a fantastic job

13:02 in pitching the business case and the challenge around

13:07 a reason another recent acquisition we made which is abstract.

13:10 That's all about close-loop intent-based

13:15 automation of the data center in particular.

13:18 Exactly that scenario you're talking about, being able to bring that.

13:21 -Well, exactly.

13:22 We're trying to get into that idea of,

13:26 "What you want and what you've got,"

13:28 sort of a desired versus an observed state.

13:33 We're just iterating between the two really.

13:36 Once you got that nailed down, it makes life a lot simpler

13:41 to say, "Well, that's what I'm aiming for because that's what we've defined.

13:45 That's what I've got.

13:45 How do I make the two match?"

13:48 If that means to start with doing something manually, okay, that's fine.

13:52 Then look at automating that cycle between the two.

13:56 Yes, exciting times.

13:58 -Totally get it. Totally get it.

13:59 Just in terms of wrapping things up,

14:02 we talked about a few other key macro trends.

14:05 Here's another one for you, which is the cloud.

14:09 [chuckles]

14:10 How Aston Martin and you and your team

14:14 are harnessing the real benefits and capabilities that the cloud can bring?

14:20 -It's quite a timely question really

14:23 because we're actually in the middle of a quite major ERP migration to the cloud.

14:28 It will be so far as a service product, of course.

14:34 It replaces a number of fragmented products

14:39 that we've got currently internally.

14:41 That's quite a large project.

14:45 It means then the Internet connectivity for every site,

14:48 not just the main factories, has to be absolutely key.

14:54 We can't get away from that.

14:57 Historically, if you don't have an Internet connection,

15:00 it doesn't stop production because you can carry on.

15:05 Yes, you don't get emails, yes, you don't make phone calls,

15:07 and yes, it is a pain for the office users,

15:10 but when you host stuff internally, production can still run.

15:17 Now, moving to the cloud, brings about some great advantages.

15:22 If that goes wrong, it has the potential to really be quite damaging.

15:27 A lot of in-house systems that we've got,

15:30 for example, our PLM platform, that's CAD,

15:35 CAE, computer-aided design engineering,

15:38 it's got huge compute and storage requirements

15:42 that don't really suit public cloud offerings.

15:47 We have to consider the fact that there's always going to be data centers

15:52 that we've got internally to house that computing and storage platforms.

15:56 Gaydon just recently has it's data center refresh.

16:00 Saint Athan is actually mid-cycle.

16:04 Even though we hear Saint Athan is quite a new project,

16:07 it's been ongoing for the last three years.

16:09 I've been working at Aston for just coming up five years now.

16:12 It started not long after I started.

16:17 That refresh cycle is coming up as well.

16:20 If we can move, our systems

16:23 that need to be hosted internally across those two data centers

16:26 using something like VXLAN EVPN that kind of thing.

16:31 It means then that we're using the private cloud

16:34 in the truest sense of the word, not just a server in a cupboard somewhere.

16:39 Again, it's exciting times for us.

16:41 I keep saying that, but with the right technology,

16:44 it's Juniper-based at both data centers.

16:46 Even if the storage and compute different vendors,

16:50 if we can have a common technology underlying,

16:54 again it gets back to what we said at the beginning

16:57 about the experience for the end-users.

17:00 -Darryl, listen, really appreciate the insight and the time you've taken.

17:04 I've found it fascinating and just thanks, once again,

17:07 for your trust and business with Juniper.

17:10 I look forward to catching up with you again

17:11 maybe in person over a beer at some point.

17:14 -Absolutely, yes. Look forward to it. Thanks very much.

17:17 -Thanks.

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