Jaguar Land Rover improves vehicle design with networked data storage

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has deployed a new networked storage system to help simplify data storage capacity and improve data management for its vehicle designs.

The demand for new products in shorter timeframes, while reducing dependency on physical testing, had put pressure on JLR engineers to improve and streamline virtual simulation processes and deliver actionable analysis to the manufacturing teams.

JLR depends on advanced computer aided engineering (CAE) and high performance computing (HPC) to develop, deliver and verify each new design, to help ensure that every vehicle is optimised for safety, aerodynamics and performance and economy.

To support this system of working, JLR selected an EMC Isilon scale-out NAS (network attached storage) system to improve performance and capacity. The company deployed 54 nodes within the cluster of an Isilon X-Series platform, providing a central CAE storage area that mounts to the client infrastructure.

HPC clusters provide a single CAE data management solution for virtual simulation and physical tests, including safety, durability and aerodynamics.

Additionally, JLR is using a separate Isilon NL-Series cluster for disaster recovery and backup, with the Isilon SyncIQ software application providing asynchronous data replication between the primary X-Series cluster and remote NL-Series cluster.

JLR said it had now "consolidated its workflow to a single file system and point of management, had simplified its IT infrastructure, accelerated productivity, had increased both capacity and performance, and had reduced costs".

The Associated Press also recently announced it was using a NAS system to support the data demands of its high-definition video production and archive workflows.