China SAIC Motor Deploys NexentaEdge From Nexenta by DDN

Nexenta by DDN (Nexenta) announced SAIC Motor Corporation Limited, the largest automobile giant in China and ≠36 on Fortune’s Global 500 list, has deployed Nexenta by DDN’s hybrid and multicloud storage software.

Chosen to power next-gen initiatives including SAIC’s AI self-driving car R&D platform and Internet cloud center, the deployment size measures to tens of petabyte and enables the customer to improve resiliency and flexibility across multiple areas of business.

“Thanks to Nexenta by DDN, we are able to deploy a solution that allows SAIC Motor to accelerate and modernize our IT innovation,” said Hanshen Gong, director of data center, SAIC Motors. “The ability to fit our growing business requirements across many areas of business for today and in the future was essential to our decision for selecting NexentaEdge.“

SAIC is investing in intelligent driving technology research and industrialization of exploration solutions. To help drive this innovation, it chose Nexenta by DDN’s scale-out SDS for cloud-native applications, NexentaEdge,  having the ability to use containers such as Kubernetes, Docker, MongoDB to deliver cost-optimized automation. Other features include enterprise-grade data integrity, inline data reduction, unlimited point in time copies, performing 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 struggled with disparate storage solutions across their IT infrastructure. With complex and unmanageable systems required to support their need for object (S3), block and file (NFS), it was never able to place these previous solutions into production. As its 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 uses NexentaEdge for, is as the storage for their AI driving R&D platform, using the S3 protocol with NFS transparent data access. SAIC 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.

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 storage infrastructure for SAIC’s Internet Cloud Center. All data generated from Internet applications are stored on NexentaEdge, including the SAIC’s big data platform.

SAIC will leverage NexentaEdge’s multi-datacenter, distributed, storage namespace with transparent data access across three data centers to perform backups and application DR. NexentaEdge is deployed in two of SAIC’s data centers in China, in Shanghai and Nanjing, with plans to expand to its third data center in Zhengzhou later in 2019.