The in-car experience has come a long way since the early days of automotive transportation. Cars have morphed into the ultimate consumer gadget. That means drivers are much more focused on what’s inside. At the same time, features and capabilities such as infotainment systems and autonomous parking have become table stakes. To accelerate innovation, automotive companies have had to adopt software-driven business models to meet current and future market expectations.
One of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers has made this transition successfully. Using Portworx® Enterprise by Pure Storage®, it is managing persistent storage for cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes. This strategy is the cornerstone of its application development stack. As a result, this global brand has modernized the fleet of applications that its employees, drivers, and dealers rely on every day. These range from plant management and dealer warranty systems to popular in-vehicle features.
In the process, the company is also achieving cost savings while gaining the scalability to fuel progress well into the future.
Navigating the Modern Storage Landscape
Maximizing development speed and agility requires flexible, powerful storage. Already using Kubernetes to develop, test, and deploy new applications, the company invested in Portworx Enterprise as a key pillar of its containerization strategy. Portworx delivers fast and reliable container storage that eliminates barriers to innovation and accelerates time to market.
The company relies on Portworx in three key environments. The first is the core data center, where internal dealer portals and Jenkins workloads reside. From the edge, Portworx also supports containerized applications and utilities in the manufacturing plants. And the third is, in Google Cloud, powering GitLab, analytics, database, and messaging framework workloads.
The inherent automation capabilities of Portworx and Kubernetes speed the end-to-end software development process—from initial build to deployment—while also providing a data protection layer for backup and recovery. Just as importantly, by reducing its dependency on the underlying infrastructure, the company achieves cloud independence that delivers true app and data portability.
Delivering ROI in Spades
The investment is paying off. Gone are the days of waiting up to three months for storage. Now, the company can spin up storage in a matter of minutes. Managing storage is also a lot easier now that the underlying infrastructure is programmable, accessible, and scalable—whether it’s running in the public cloud or on premises.
And despite the level of enterprise functionality that Portworx delivers, the company is experiencing savings on par with what other customers report: an upfront cost reduction of up to 60%. The pay-as-you-grow model creates smaller-capacity volumes that scale as application usage ramps up. Any excess capacity gets re-distributed to support ongoing development needs.
A strong partnership with Pure and gold-standard solutions like Portworx are driving the company’s business forward—on all fronts. Pure’s sustainability-first approach to storage means more capacity with fewer racks, even as data volumes grow. This efficiency leads to less power and cooling emissions from physical data centers and helps the company move closer to its goal of achieving a neutral carbon footprint in the coming decades.
Bringing Peace of Mind to the Automotive Industry and Beyond
The company is actively exploring more ways to reduce the probability of a full-scale disaster recovery event with the help of Portworx. With Kubernetes instances spread across multiple regional data centers, resiliency in its data storage platform is even more crucial. Application owners can back up and restore apps anywhere in just a few clicks with Portworx Backup.
Pure is thrilled to support this leading vehicle manufacturer and the legion of loyal drivers who have helped create one of the most valuable brands of our time. We can’t wait to see where the road ahead will take us.
