Jaguar Land Rover selects EMC Isilon to drive simulations

The demand for new products in shorter timeframes forced JLR to reduce physical testing a couple of years ago and, in turn, put pressure on engineering to improve and streamline its virtual simulation operations. That led to its award-winning technology – involving CAE and HPC (high performance computing) for design optimisation and verification – part of which is now the new storage architecture. EMC Isilon technology gave the system the capacity to scale and meet what is described as significant growth in high performance data storage, which could not be supported by its legacy CAE architecture. Key benefits include reduced complexity and costs, resulting from JLR's ability to consolidate its workflow to a single file system and point of management. That simplified the IT infrastructure, so also accelerating productivity, increasing capacity and performance and reducing costs. JLR reckons it also achieved increased power efficiency – so decreasing its environmental impact, both in the data centre and in simulation operations. Further, by deploying Isilon X-Series and NL-Series scale-out NAS, with an N+3 protection setting, Jaguar Land Rover has ensured that, even in the event of a total three-node failure, crucial data remains immediately available. JLR has deployed 54 nodes in the cluster of the Isilon X-Series platform, providing a central CAE storage area that mounts to the client infrastructure. The HPC clusters then 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 providing asynchronous data replication between the primary X-Series cluster and remote NL-Series.