Mazda Deploys Storwize Real-time Data Compression Appliance

Tokyo Electron Device Limited announced that Mazda Motor Corporation, headquartered in Aki-gun, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, has reduced the volume of data used to design new cars (mainly in CAD) by two-thirds compared to the previous level, thus achieving a substantial reduction in storage investment costs, by means of deploying the STN-6500 from Storwize, Inc.

In 1996, Mazda launched the Mazda Digital Innovation (MDI) project and since that time has digital information to promote end-to-end process innovation on a company-wide scale, ranging from product planning to preparations for production. For this project, the company managed all of the tens of thousands of parts that comprised a car using 3D digital data, which continued to increase annually in units of terabytes. In addition, even after a car model is phased out of production, such data needs to be stored for ten years in order for Mazda to fulfill its product responsibility and provide product warranties. In the past, Mazda stored this data in three units of NetApp Inc.’s NetApp FAS940C/FAS3050C, but given the inevitability that the volume of data would continue to grow in the future the company began considering measures to keep expenditures on storage under control.

In December 2007, after six months of verification, Mazda deployed STN-6500 (a high-end model from Storwize’s real-time data compression appliance STN-6000 Series) for one of its NetApp FAS3050C units. By June 2008, the company had compressed 10TB of its data, resulting in a 6.5TB reduction in data. The STN-6000 Series uses its unique compression/expansion technology to substantially reduce the volume of data stored in NAS (NetApp, EMC) and improve the performance of storage systems.

The results brought by deploying STN-6500 are:

• Data can be compressed by two-thirds compared to the original volume, providing up to 27 TB of data storage for each unit of NetApp FAS3050C, for a maximum total capacity of 81TB.
• One secondary benefit is that power consumption is reduced by some 17 kW compared to the data storage area for a similar volume of data.

Since the recent deployment of STN-6500 brought high cost reduction effects, Mazda will implement a phased expansion of the scope of data to be compressed. The company plans to compress data equivalent to an entire unit of FAS3050C by March 2009.
TED will support Storwize’s products through its extensive structure and actively offer storage solutions that meet corporate needs in the future.