Panasas®, the leader in performance scale-out network-attached storage (NAS), today announced that NIO, a pioneer in China’s premium electric vehicle market, has selected Panasas ActiveStor® storage technology to support the ongoing product design and development efforts of its high-performance, premium electric vehicles. NIO delivered its first mainstream production car, the 7-seater ES8 high-performance electric SUV, in June 2018 in China. The ES8 features an onboard pilot system, an advanced autonomous driving assistant, and the first in-car intelligent AI system. NIO plans to launch its next vehicle, the 5-seater ES6 electric SUV in late 2018.
NIO deployed ActiveStor to create a high-performance storage environment capable of supporting manufacturing computer-aided engineering (CAE) vehicle design simulations using STAR-CCM+ and HyperWorks software, and crash simulation tests using LS-Dyna multi-physics simulation software.
“NIO updated its data storage infrastructure with Panasas ActiveStor to accelerate the complex workflows associated with the design optimization and prototyping phase of our advanced electric cars,” said Zhijie Fang, HPC manager at NIO. “High-performance computing plays an essential role in our vehicle design process, and Panasas ActiveStor storage delivers the high performance and limitless scalability we need to manage and work with the large amount of data generated during our rigorous design simulation process.”
NIO rose to prominence in 2016 with the introduction of the EP9 (Electric Performance 9), the world’s fastest electric supercar. The EP9 holds the record for the fastest electric lap on the Nordschleife of the Nürburgring race track in Germany, the record for the fastest lap time for a production car with a driver at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, as well as the record for the fastest self-driving car at COTA.
“NIO is redefining the electric car ownership experience with vehicles that deliver the latest advancements in performance, safety and comfort, and we are thrilled to be their data storage partner,” said Faye Pairman, president and chief executive officer at Panasas. “HPC applications rely on high-performance data storage, and our customers rely on us to provide a fast, flexible and easy-to-manage storage solution that optimizes business results.”
ActiveStor is a fully-integrated, clustered scale-out NAS appliance that delivers the raw speed and enterprise-grade reliability required for compute-intensive and complex workflow environments. Its modular architecture includes customizable, flexible components that can easily adapt to meet dynamic business needs, allowing users to grow quickly and within budget.
ActiveStor is delivered as a plug-and-play solution that incorporates hybrid storage nodes containing flash and SATA media, the Panasas PanFS® distributed parallel file system and the Panasas DirectFlow® parallel data access protocol. Industry-standard NFS and SMB client protocols are also supported. PanFS creates a single pool of storage under a global filename space to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system with high performance for technical applications. Metadata performance, data bandwidth, and data capacity scale independently for faster time to results. DirectFlow avoids traditional protocol I/O bottlenecks by allowing compute clients to access each storage node directly and in parallel.