Customer Stories

posted on 31 July 2008 07:10

Mazda has reduced design data volumes by two thirds through using Storwize data compression. Basically it's found a way to expand the capacity of its backend NetApp storage boxes by 66 percent.

Since 1996 Mazda has stored all of a car's 3D design information digitally. There are tens of terabytes of information, which needs to be kept for ten years after a car ends production for product warranty and owner support purposes. It's also being constantly added to as new cars get designed.

Mazda stores this 3D design data on on a NetApp FAS940C and two FAS3050Cs but, foreseeing endless growth, looked for a way to curtail it. 

The car-maker checked out technology from Storwize. This compresses data in-line at wire speed as it traverses between servers and primary storage with no additional latencies. By compressing at the point of origin, where data is initially created, less data is written to storage, leading to significant reductions in storage systems’ CPU and disk utilization and with a dramatic improvement of the effective cache size by as much as 20 times.

In December 2007, and after six months of verification, Mazda deployed Storwize's high-end STN-6500 compression appliance for one of its NetApp FAS3050Cs. The STN-6000 front ends the NetApp box and compresses data going in and expands data coming out.

It found that its design data was compressed by two-thirds compared to its original volume, providing up to 27TB of effective data storage for each FAS3050C, for a maximum total capacity of 81TB. A secondary benefit was that power consumption is reduced by some 17 kW compared to the data storage area for a similar volume of data.

By June 2008, the good news was that the company had compressed 10TB of its data, resulting in a 6.5TB reduction in data volume. So Mazda is going to expand its use of the Storwize products. Zoom zoom.

^{[B&F staff.]}