Jaguar Land Rover Drives With EMC Isilon X and NL

EMC Corporation announced that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the UK manufacturer of vehicles, has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS to simplify storage for its capacity and performance.

The demand for new products in shorter timeframes whilst 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 ensure that every vehicle is optimized across a range of customer attributes such as safety, quality, robustness, dynamics, aerodynamics and performance and economy.

In 2010, the company undertook a project to decrease reliance on physical testing and increase its simulation operations, a project for which it has won the 2011 Project Excellence Awards for Business Project of the Year from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. The award recognized the company’s work in aligning the right technologies to meet its changing business needs. Among those needs was new storage architecture capable of scaling in line with JLR’s growing demand for simulation analysis – this was provided by Isilon.

Customer Benefits:

• Reduced complexity and costs: JLR consolidated its workflow to a single file system and point of management, simplifying the IT infrastructure, accelerating productivity, increasing both capacity and performance and reducing costs.
• Environmental impact: JLR achieved increased power efficiency and decreased its environmental impact, both in the data center and in simulation operations.
• Disaster Recovery: By deploying Isilon X-Series and NL-Series scale-out NAS, with an N+3 protection setting, JLR ensured that even in the event of a total three node failure crucial data will remain available.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
To utilize CAE to deliver its new vehicle programs, JLR invested in technologies to increase simulation capability. The increased virtual simulations created a significant growth in high performance data storage which could not be supported by the existing legacy CAE storage architecture.

JLR evaluated a number of different solutions and selected an Isilon scale-out NAS system due to its ‘no-compromise’ approach to performance and capacity. The company deployed 54 nodes within the cluster of the Isilon X-Series platform, providing a central CAE storage area that mounts to the client infrastructure. The HPC clusters provide a single CAE data management solution for virtual simulation and physical tests including safety, durability, chassis, aerodynamics, ride and handling. Additionally, JLR is using a separate Isilon NL-Series cluster for disaster recovery and backup, with Isilon SyncIQ software application providing asynchronous data replication between the primary X-Series cluster and remote NL-Series cluster.

Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, EMC Isilon, said: "JLR produces some of the best luxury SUV’s and sports cars the industry has to offer. They need a storage solution to match the rapid advances in simulation technology to help sort through the resulting Big Data. EMC Isilon delivers a simple, flexible and scalable platform that JLR has leveraged to maximize performance and capacity, while simplifying management and lowering overall environmental impact of their operations."