Hyundai Mobis Has Chosen Qumulo Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS

Qumulo, Inc., in data-aware scale-out NAS, announced that Hyundai MOBIS has chosen its Core for its performance, capacity, scalability and manageability.

Hyundai MOBIS is the world’s sixth largest supplier of automotive parts and components, with assisted and autonomous driving at the core of its R&D focus. Helping vehicles to ‘see’ and react like a human requires analyzing hundreds of terabytes of real-world video data and storing that massive quantity of video and keeping it accessible is a challenge for the Hyundai MOBIS IT team.

“We can’t store large quantities of video in small pockets of fragmented storage,” said John Beck, IT manager, Hyundai MOBIS. “Yet, that’s what we had with our existing NetApp, Inc.‘s scale-up storage system, and adding more capacity threatened to only make the situation worse.“

Beck and his team began looking for a storage solution, and recognized that scale-out storage was a better alternative for Hyundai MOBIS, delivering the single-volume architecture and linear scalability lacking in traditional scale-up solutions. Beck initially considered scale-out storage from EMC Isilon, but ultimately decided against it due to its high cost, lack of innovation and poor support.

Beck found another solution in Qumulo, which delivers flexible, fast and scalable storage as well as the real-time analytics necessary for visibility into Hyundai MOBIS’ data usage and storage performance at scale. Additionally, its flash-first hybrid architecture leverages affordable commodity hardware to keep costs for Hyundai MOBIS well below offerings from both Isilon and NetApp.

Beck’s team selected Qumulo’s QC208 hybrid storage appliances, deploying a six-node cluster capable of storing more than 600TB of data. According to Beck, even at that scale, the deployment was simple.

“With Qumulo, I just connected some cables and I was done,” said Beck. “I deployed the NetApp storage barely six months earlier, and had a totally different experience. Qumulo is so easy to set up and maintain.“

Hyundai MOBIS’ R&D team is currently storing over 120TB of research video on the Qumulo system, with more data being added all the time. The cluster can ingest that stream of machine data without constant management, freeing Beck’s team to concentrate on other things.

“The Qumulo cluster is super simple for us to maintain,” said Beck. “In fact, other than occasional software updates, we really don’t have to spend any time on it at all.“

Additionally, the Qumulo Care support team monitors the system and alerts Beck to any potential problems, and has even alerted Beck about possible drive issues before any failure could disrupt operations.

“The Qumulo support team is amazing in its ability to help us head off issues before they become problems,” said Beck. “Qumulo’s proactive monitoring is a pretty cool advantage and the best service experience I’ve ever had. It seems like they’re actually watching out for us.“

Beck has plans for expanding Hyundai MOBIS’ Qumulo deployment over time. He is impressed with the system and finds that he no longer has to worry about his data.

“Managing data with Qumulo is so simple it’s hard to describe the impact,” concluded Beck. “It’s given us tremendous ROI in terms of time saved and problems eliminated, and having that reliable storage we can finally trust makes us eager to use it more broadly throughout the company.“

Case study