As a world leader in new energy vehicles and Internet-connected cars, SAIC Motors is investing heavily in intelligent driving technology research and industrialization of exploration solutions. To help drive this innovation, SAIC Motors chose Nexenta by DDN’s Scale-Out SDS for cloud-native applications, NexentaEdge. NexentaEdge has the ability to use containers such as Kubernetes, Docker, MongoDB, and others to deliver efficient and cost-optimized automation. Other key features include enterprise-grade data integrity, inline data reduction, unlimited point in time copies, high-performance erasure coding, and a low-cost operating model.
“NexentaEdge customers like SAIC Motors benefit from the flexibility provided to manage storage solutions as a cloud-native application, as well as the ability to use multi-protocol support to access the same data in a geographically transparent multicloud in globally consistent ways,” said Tarkan Maner, CEO, Nexenta by DDN. “We are excited to be working with an innovative organization like SAIC Motors Corporation as they bring to life futuristic tech innovations and introduce them to further enable technologies for AI/ML and multicloud solutions from all three DDN companies – DDN Storage, Nexenta and Tintri.”
Before introducing NexentaEdge, SAIC Motor struggled with disparate storage solutions across their IT infrastructure. With complex and unmanageable systems required to support their comprehensive need for Object (S3), Block and File (NFS), SAIC was never able to place these previous solutions into production. As SAIC Motor’s data center business and infrastructure continued to scale and expand, it became urgent to find a distributed storage system that fit these requirements for its future data and multicloud needs.
One of the areas SAIC Motor uses NexentaEdge for, is as the storage for their AI driving R&D platform, using the S3 protocol with NFS transparent data access. SAIC Motors will utilize NexentaEdge’s S3 service as the storage architecture of the SAIC Hadoop big data platform to replace legacy HDFS storage resources, improving performance as well as stability. This allows cost effective long-term retention and eventually off-site replication thanks to Nexenta by DDN. After the vast amounts of real-time collected data are stored in S3, it is post-processed by the high-speed GPU servers, and the data is read and further analyzed using the NexentaEdge NFS file service. Using hybrid scale-out deployment and leveraging hardware from HPE, SAIC can deliver a flexible solution that meets the required performance, scalability and varied file size handling of their AI environment.
NexentaEdge also supports primary data storage infrastructure for SAIC Motor’s Internet Cloud Center. All data generated from Internet applications are stored on NexentaEdge, including the SAIC Motor Corporation’s big data platform. SAIC Motor will leverage NexentaEdge’s multi-datacenter, globally distributed, data storage namespace with transparent data access across three data centers to perform data backups and application disaster recovery. NexentaEdge is deployed in two of SAIC Motor’s data centers in Shanghai and Nanjing, with plans to expand to its third data center in Zhengzhou later in 2019.