Suzuki Speeds Up Vehicle Design and Innovation With DDN

Japanese automotive and motorcycle company Suzuki Motor Corporation has consolidated its CAE system on DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) scalable, efficient, high-performance storage platform.

The CAE system is the core of Suzuki’s product development, accelerating the development of new vehicles and motorcycles.

Over time, Suzuki’s storage system began to experience performance issues and scaling challenges associated with accommodating the explosion in design, engineering and production data, as well as cost and management inefficiencies.

Working with SCSK Corporation to address these challenges, Suzuki deployed a DDN Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) performance storage engine and GRIDScaler parallel file system to consolidate its storage into a new shared CAE storage system to support its production environment.

The new SFA-based, shared storage system provides consolidated storage to various CAE compute nodes from different vendors (used for crash analysis, structural analysis and fluid dynamics) via a shared IB storage network. It provides more than five times the current maximum disk space and throughput requirements of the company’s CAE engineers.

The storage infrastructure lowers Suzuki’s overall TCO by eliminating storage ‘silos’, thus increasing the efficiency of increasingly complex, multidiscipline design and simulation workflows.

Suzuki’s CAE system has the performance and flexibility to handle new business requirements and accommodate growth.

Yoshihiko Sunayama, PH.D, group manager, CAE promotion group, digital engineering department, Suzuki Motor, said: “To improve vehicle design and development efficiency as well as vehicle performance, CAE model sizes are getting bigger, allowing for more types of analysis and expanding the number of parallel jobs year by year. As a result, this has increased the demand and workload of our CAE system resources. DDN delivers fast performance and huge scale, so we can seamlessly expand our CAE system environment and increase overall system efficiency without impacting production. With DDN technology, we’re able to store, manage and share growing design and simulation data, turning the focus to vehicle design and innovation, not on complex infrastructure management.”

Robert Triendl, president, DDN Japan, said: “We are very pleased to work with Suzuki on this important project to build an adaptive and fully integrated storage environment for the company’s CAE design and simulation workflow. Our partnership with Suzuki reinforces our expertise in working with organizations with complex CAE workflows, and our strength in designing and delivering multi-PB class large storage systems. DDN is well-known in academic research, government and media markets, but our highest growth is coming from commercial HPC opportunities where our performance and scale can solve the big data problems which affect our customers’ bottom line.“