Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the UK's largest manufacturer of premium vehicles, has deployed EMC Isilon scale-out NAS to simplify storage. 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 ensure that every vehicle is optimised across a range of customer attributes such as safety, quality, robustness, dynamics, aerodynamics, performance and economy. In 2010, the company undertook a project to decrease reliance on physical testing and increase its simulation operations. 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 EMC Isilon scale-out NAS system. 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.
