Quantum Unveils Ruggedized in-Vehicle Storage Solution

Quantum Corp. announced a ruggedized, in-vehicle storage solution designed specifically for mobile and remote capture of video and other IoT sensor data.

Click to enlarge

The company’s Mobile Storage products are available in different capacity and performance models and are designed for mobile environment such as autonomous vehicle development, where each vehicle produces several terabytes of video, image and sensor data every day. It simplifies data ingest by including unique features that automate the process of offloading data to a StorNext shared storage environment. This offering, combined with StorNext performance parallel file system, enables a complete workflow for autonomous vehicle development.

The firm’s Mobile Storage also has applications for other mobile storage environments such as rolling stock video on trains and buses, as well as military uses.

Built to withstand rigors of mobile testing
In-vehicle storage units for autonomous vehicle development must meet unique requirements. They must be designed to suit dynamic environmental conditions with limited physical space and electrical power and mobility. They also require sufficient performance and capacity to retain data streams from more than a dozen cameras and sensors operating simultaneously within the constraints of a moving autonomous test vehicle. Mobile Storage is designed specifically for this challenging environment, with many unique features:

• Small form factor chassis design: Minimizes storage space, enabling more room for ECUs, compute or other hardware components.

• Magazine carrier: Optional ruggedized case provides protection and security for drive magazines during storage and transport. Mobile Storage incorporates a removable magazine design that enables the fastest transport of data from the vehicle to the garage or datacenter. The removable magazine also allows for long duration test drives where full magazines can be swapped with empty ones so the test drive can continue collecting data without visiting the garage.

• Designed for automotive use: Ruggedized unit operates in a range of environmental conditions necessary for proper vehicle testing; 12VDC power ensures integration, efficient power use and reliable operation.

• RAID support: Ensures performance and reliability, including RAID-5 or RAID-6 for added protection.

• Automated ingest: The company leverages StorNext FlexSync to simplify the data ingest process.

Offloading data from Mobile Storage to StorNext
Autonomous vehicle testing generates and captures massive amounts of data each day which must be analysed in short timeframes, and then preserved for long-term reference. Mobile Storage offers an infrastructure for capturing, storing, managing, protecting and accessing petabytes to exabytes of test and development data.

Mobile Storage integrates with StorNext based scale-out storage portfolio, which is suited to address the challenges of sharing, protecting, preserving and analysing massive volumes of rich media. Because StorNext environments offer shared data access in a unified global namespace across multiple tiers of workflow-optimized storage, autonomous vehicle developers can substantially gain efficiency, shortening their test and development cycles. With its automated StorNext ingest capability, Mobile Storage can improve overall productivity by enhancing efficiency at the beginning of the workflow.

Flexible design suited to variety of applications
The Mobile Storage is designed to be adapted for use in a range of applications beyond vehicle testing, such as mobile security and compliance platforms, video surveillance, public transportation, shipping, law enforcement, on-set video recording and production. The firm’s storage solution provides flexibility to align storage capacity, performance and cost with data capture requirements by choosing SSDs or HDDs in 2.5″ or 3.5″ form factors.

Quantum Mobile Storage will be available in early 2019.

Bobby Hambrick, founder and CEO, AutonomouStuff, said: “With the dynamic environmental conditions, limited space and power available in a moving vehicle, storage has been a persistent hurdle for autonomous vehicle research. Quantum Mobile Storage addresses this storage challenge. This is vital to our mission to bring safe and reliable AVs to the world’s roadways.“

Mark Pastor, product director, data archive, Quantum, said: “Autonomous driving has the potential to change society in profound ways, and its development depends on an enormous volume of rich media. Quantum Mobile Storage products fill an important gap by providing an efficient method for getting this data from the vehicle to the analysis and development environment. This solution has been engineered to operate under the rigors of mobile environments, and therefore opens the door to a variety of other emerging applications.“

Click to enlarge

Resources:
Quantum’s automotive testing DS
StorNext