Welcome to the Episode 387, part of the continuing series called “Behind the Scenes of the NetApp Tech ONTAP Podcast.”
A lot goes into making a car, and even more data is used. That data has to go somewhere, and oftentimes, it goes on NetApp storage – whether on-prem or in the cloud.
Tilman Schroeder (tilman.schroeder@netapp.com), NetApp’s automotive industry expert, joins us to discuss how NetApp helps drive the automotive industry.
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Transcription
The following transcript was generated using Descript’s speech to text service and then further edited. As it is AI generated, YMMV.
Tech ONTAP Podcast Episode 387 – How NetApp Helps Drive the Automotive Industry
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Justin Parisi: This week on the Tech ONTAP Podcast, Tilman Schroeder joins us to talk to us all about how NetApp empowers the automotive industry.
Podcast intro/outro: [Intro]
Justin Parisi: Hello and welcome to the Tech ONTAP Podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. I’m here in the basement of my house and with me today I have a special guest to talk to us all about the automotive industry as well as what NetApp does with that. So Tilman Schroeder is here today. Tilman, what do you do here at NetApp and how do we reach you?
Tilman Schroeder: Hi, first of all, thanks, Justin, for having me today.
Yeah, I’m Till, I’m based out of Germany, and I’m the CTO for Automotive and Manufacturing here at NetApp. And what I do is basically building industry specific solutions where our technology makes sense and trying to scale those kind of solutions. You can reach me via email, via LinkedIn all of the above.
Justin Parisi: All right. Excellent. So we’re here to talk about the automotive industry. And I think most people know generally what that is, but what they don’t know is all the stuff that goes into making a car. Like it’s not just building out the frame and, putting on the tires and that sort of thing.
There’s a lot that goes on before any of that ever happens. And that’s where NetApp comes in because there’s a lot of data that goes into that process. So tell me a little bit about that industry and why NetApp plays so well in it.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah thanks first of all for the question. So, obviously there’s a lot going on right now in the automotive industry, as you can tell by the news that are popping up. Every week we have new market leaders in that space, we have new technology that is here to lead with, and that is succeeding, such as electrification or hybrid engines and this kind of stuff, so it’s very volatile. But what’s consistent is the four major trends that are currently going on in the automotive industry, which can be also translated into CASE, C-A-S-E, which stands for connectivity, autonomy so autonomous driving, sustainability and electrification, which are the major trends that are currently going on in the automotive industry.
And we can talk about each of those and how NetApp creates value in each of those pillars.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s start with the acronym. I’ve never heard that acronym before. So I guess connectivity is the first one. So what does that mean for the automotive industry?
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, sure. So connectivity, as you mentioned, is the first one and connectivity stands for the car becoming more like a mobility service. Being connected to your phone and all the other applications that you might run. So you have all the information about the car always handy. And this obviously translates into collecting data out of the services which then needs to be stored.
The car is becoming like a mobility service. You want to be entertained, you want to be connected during a ride. You want to have all the data available wherever you are about the car and developing those kind of connected services that ultimately creates additional value to the driver is what connectivity is about, right?
So it could be a connected car app, where you can unlock the car, for example, but also have real time data about the health of the car, about the fuel or electricity rate of the car and all these kinds of things. So connecting the car and integrating it more and more into everyday life is the pillar of connectivity.
Justin Parisi: Would something like Apple Carplay fit into that?
Tilman Schroeder: Yea for example but it can be even deeper, right? So connectivity could also mean like your insurance policies connected to your car in a way. So that your insurance provider can be actually connected to your physical goods, to your car and provide to you real time insurance services and a better service in the end more personalized service in the end.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, the safe driver programs, where if you are a safe driver, you get lower rates. I’m not totally sure how I feel about an insurance company monitoring how we drive, but you know, whatever. I mean, it’s a good idea, I think, maybe, possibly. And another example might be your tire pressure meters, right?
Like you have little sensors within each little tire gauge, and if they get low, then it tells you that your tire is low and then you can reset that sensor and move on.
Tilman Schroeder: For example, right. In the end, it’s a connectivity is also for making the car more intelligent more proactive instead of reactive.
This is also underneath connectivity to make it not just about riding a car, but more like mobility as a service, that you can just consume.
Justin Parisi: So where does NetApp fit into that particular category? Are we responsible for the data of the apps? Are we responsible for the data of the car itself? Is the car reporting back or all of the above? Where do you position NetApp?
Tilman Schroeder: For example, let’s take connectivity, right? It’s also currently utilized in motorsport as an example where the cars are already very much connected and what is happening there, they’re collecting all the telemetry data or parametric data from a car. For example the pressure on the brakes or some kind of heat temperatures everything’s collected there within the vehicle, which is then pushed to the cloud to run analytics or to run other kind of computational things.
Justin Parisi: Alright, that’s connectivity. Our next letter is a and that will be autonomous or autonomy or whatever, right?
So that’s your autonomous driving. We kind of understand what that is. But could you go into a little more detail for people who might not understand that?
Tilman Schroeder: So autonomy basically means that the car can drive without any intervention of the driver. And there we have different autonomy levels from level one to level five. And it basically means going from some kind of minor advanced assistance systems up to really full autonomy, where you don’t even need a steering wheel and ultimately you can just be transported from A to B. Those are the different levels of autonomy. And right now, this is the holy grail in the automotive industry.
Everyone from Tesla to General Motors to also all the German automotive providers and Tier 1 suppliers even are currently investing heavily in this field in order to be the first ones to actually first of all, have the prestige of developing through autonomous cars, but secondly, also benefit from a business model that might come up from autonomous cars. This is super interesting for the automotive companies, but also a very high risk bet because ultimately you don’t know what full autonomous cars will eventually have an impact on the car industry itself. So, this is also a super interesting topic because then it becomes also a little bit philosophical, right?
Do you actually then need to own a car or is it just about sharing cars or do you need this prestige and this brand if all the cars are driving around autonomously? I don’t have an opinion about that yet, but those are very interesting philosophical questions that are currently going around when you talk about autonomous cars and these kind of things.
I think there’s a lot of skepticism as well around autonomous cars. So you often hear people saying, autonomous cars are always five years ahead. And this is every year the same that there will never be something like autonomous cars driving around. But from my opinion, if you just look into the past and what is happening today with cars already driving around in San Francisco and also these kinds of things, I think it’s very impressive and I’m more optimistic that in some point in future, whether it’s in five, 10 or 20 years we will have reached some degree of full autonomous cars driving around and bringing us from A to B.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, I kind of wonder if it’s going to be a passenger type of thing, because at some point you’re basically reinventing a bus, a personalized bus. But as far as the autonomous driving goes, I think it’s great for some of the more mundane driving tasks, like your cross country truck delivery, storage type of stuff. Taxi driving, those types of Things where there’s a high accident rate in some cases because people get fatigued and tired. So having an autonomous truck where a driver is there and they’re not having to man it the entire time. I think that’s where it makes a lot of sense.
But as far as passengers go, like I said, it’s, it’s basically reinventing public transportation. I’m not sure what kind of appetite there’ll be for that.
Tilman Schroeder: True, true. But that’s also the beauty of innovation and those kinds of fields, right? Because I fully agree, it makes a lot of sense to have this as a use case where you have trucks driving around and bringing goods from A to B. But where you really see the adoption of autonomous cars right now is more than in San Francisco, right? Taxis or cabs driving around, bringing people from A to B. I think Waymo is the company that is already operating this. And, then you see that sometimes you cannot plan those things. Sometimes it’s just happening and then it makes sense once it’s there. And before that you just have to invest in it and try and fail and iterate further. I think Autonomous Cars is something where you can see the power of this.
Justin Parisi: Make sense. All right. So our next letter is S.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah. It’s sustainability, right?
Justin Parisi: Yeah. That’s very important.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, obviously, through all those buzzwords, and here, sustainability is not only meant with the next letter E, electrification, right? So how make the actual movement of a car more sustainable, but even more about the production. How can you actually make the production of a car more sustainable? And that’s also something very interesting where Here at NetApp, we already see implications. If we answer large RFPs or customer requests, we already see this rapid development around sustainability by first needing to provide a small section about what we actually do with regards, sustainability and how we comply with sustainability standards. We really have to deliver hard facts and really be transparent about our supply chain, for example, and how much CO2 is issued during the development of our products, which will then also count into the sustainability matrices and reports of the automotive manufacturers themselves. So it’s more about the manufacturing process and how sustainable this can be in the end.
Justin Parisi: So this whole sustainability drive, it feels like there is probably some sort of regulation that got passed in some country.
I don’t know if it was the Paris Accords or something else, but it feels like that’s maybe why there’s such a push less than like, people actually, yeah, a lot of people are very concerned about it. I am concerned about it, but I don’t know that corporations would be as concerned about it if it wasn’t legally mandated.
So are you aware of anything around that or is it just simply altruism? People are like, yeah, we really need to take care of this.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, first of all, there are more and more regulations popping up that you need to comply with in terms of your CO2 footprint. But ultimately I think it’s also some kind of the brand reputation that the car manufacturers are building then.
And I think it’s really that they understand how important sustainability is when it comes to the brand perception eventually. And that they need to do something and lead with this regard. And that’s my feeling in this sector right now. It’s not just driven by rules and regulations, but I think rules and regulations can always accelerate processes.
And yeah the willingness to comply with the laws is always a very strong thing.
Justin Parisi: Would you have guessed that marketing would save the world? So our last one is, you mentioned a little bit as the electric aspect of this, the Teslas, the Rivians, that sort of thing.
So tell me about that aspect of the industry.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, this is, in my opinion, one of the most Interesting ones, because here we will also see results soon because different companies have different bets going on. Some think the world is going to be hybrid in nature comparable to NetApp. We think that there will be combustion engines, but also electric engines, living side by side, and some companies go all in when it comes to electrification and say, we will be electric in the future, and in the end, it’s really interesting what is happening then in the manufacturing processes underneath.
Because in order to develop an electric car, the whole manufacturing process is very different. So the focus shifts from the, in German we say Spaltmaß, I don’t know if you heard it, like the engineering craft. To develop beautiful cars that every piece fits into another which was the focus for the combustion engine. And now it shifts more towards car manufacturers acquiring or setting up electric battery companies where the electric battery is the heart of the electric car in terms of providing the necessary horsepower, providing the necessary energy density in order to guarantee that the car lasts as long as possible in terms of kilometer or mileage. And that’s really interesting because now the whole supply chain shifts, so you see car manufacturers acquiring battery companies and trying to build capabilities and skill in this domain. This domain will then be the lead of the winners, so eventually you will then see discussions going on whether lithium ion battery is the best option or whether a solid state battery to be integrated into cars might be from a cost performance ratio better. So, really interesting stuff going on there.
Justin Parisi: So I haven’t heard the German term you use, what was it, Speigast, or how was it said again?
Tilman Schroeder: It’s Spaltmaß, which is how each of the different components of a car perfectly fit together that you have the sense of this great engineering craftsmanship, every piece fits in together, which also helps you within the manufacturing process, that you can just pick and put things together.
This could be a definition for the Spaltmaß, which was the focus when it comes to combustion engine, right, because you need to be very detail oriented when it comes to developing an engine or just the whole chassis of a car, whereas in the electrical world, other attributes become more and more important, such as, as I said, the battery lifetime, the duration of the battery, and also the mobility services associated to the car, such as services that help you drive more efficient and provide you with the next loading station or battery station or provide you with the most efficient routes when going from point A to B right.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, here in the States, I don’t think we’ve heard that much. Our familiarity with German words in cars was the Volkswagen campaign, the fahrvergnügen.
I don’t even know if that’s a real German word. Is that a real German word?
Tilman Schroeder: Can you please repeat that? I didn’t understand.
Justin Parisi: Fahrvergnügen.
Tilman Schroeder: Oh, I haven’t heard this one.
Justin Parisi: I don’t think it’s a real, I don’t even know it’s a real word. It was like a,
Tilman Schroeder: Ah, no, I know! Fahrvergnügen, of course.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tilman Schroeder: Enjoyment of driving a car, right?
Justin Parisi: Yeah, that was our familiarity with it, with the German words and cars. And I don’t know about Germany, but I know here in the States, there is definitely a faction of people that refuse to give up their gas. So it’s very ingrained in American culture.
So I don’t know if Germany has that kind of pushback.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, of course. Also similar discussions going on which play a role in politics, for example.
Justin Parisi: Yes, it does. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Tilman Schroeder: Everybody has a very strong opinion when it comes to combustion engine.
Justin Parisi: They do. And what’s interesting is the combustion engine itself has gone through many iterations to become more and more efficient, and there wasn’t really that much of a pushback there other than like, Oh, you’re giving up a little bit of horsepower here and there, but I think that this is the straw. Like the electric car is like, no.
Tilman Schroeder: And we don’t know about what the some kind of horse companies were thinking about when the cars pull up. Right. And maybe there were some people saying, Oh
Justin Parisi: I’ll never give up my horse. Until he dies.
Tilman Schroeder: And maybe this is always associated to any kind of innovation that’s popping up, right? Which is good, some kind of skepticism, which is always good because then
Justin Parisi: Yeah. It doesn’t feel like skepticism about electrical. I feel like it could be fixed if you included features in electric cars where you could like Press a button and create a giant smoke cloud out of the back of the car, or you could inject the smell of gasoline into the car.
Then people would be happy that they get everything they want there, the power and the smell.
Tilman Schroeder: I agree. This could be the solution, right?
Justin Parisi: It’s totally the solution. Just make all the cars smell like gas. The air fresheners could be gas.
Tilman Schroeder: Maybe this is an idea for a business idea right?..
Justin Parisi: they should totally hire me. I have the best ideas. All right. So, that’s our CASE acronym. We covered Connectivity, Autonomy, Sustainability, and Electrical. Now let’s tie it all together. Where does NetApp fit into all those different aspects of the automotive industry?
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, sure. So NetApp as an intelligent data management company or data infrastructure company, how do we fit? For all those things, technology is the backbone for the research and development part of this, or producing those kinds of things up to really running all those different technologies that I’ve just listed. Connected cars, autonomous driving. The foundation for all of this is a very robust and very modern technical infrastructure.
And there we also have different paradigm shifts currently going on. First of all, there’s the movement of the cloud. So the hyperscalers entering the space and they are very active when it comes to the automotive industry, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, they are heavily investing in this space and really accelerating the innovation cycles and overall innovative performance in the car industry.
And secondly, then we also have the rise of GPUs and NVIDIA as a good example in machine learning, which is also accelerating the development of new technology overall, which then also translates great into the automotive industry. So those are, I would say the current technology paradigm shifts, or not really paradigm shifts, but really the current advancements in technology that boost this new world, where you have connected autonomous cars sustainability and electrification going on. And obviously, we as NetApp, we play a big part in both the move to the clouds, the hyperscaler ecosystem, we play a big part when it comes to accelerate GPU operations.
And what we can also do is we can even build hybrid clouds, right? So, connecting data pipelines from the edge to the core, to the cloud. That’s where we come in from a very high level point of view. So serving our customers to provide a very modern and robust and most importantly efficient and performant infrastructure to actually deploy these new services that they build and bring them to the market faster.
Justin Parisi: So let’s dive a little deeper into this. When you were talking about connectivity, you were talking about motorsports. So NetApp has a sponsorship with F1. They have a sponsorship with Ducati. And what I would like to talk about is how NetApp fits into that workflow.
What’s a solution look like for somebody who’s in the pits that’s trying to gather data about the car itself? Where does NetApp specifically go there? Where do we sit? Do we sit on the car? Do we sit in a data center? Do we sit inside the actual pit itself? How does that work?
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, sure. We can also set the stage and articulate the problem statement. So for example, in motor sports where innovation often starts, and then it gets adopted into the commercial cars. What is currently the constraint there is that those motor car companies, all those racing teams are traveling around the world and they have some kind of budget constraints, they are limited in the size that they can carry. Let’s say this week they are driving in Singapore and next week they might be driving in Germany or somewhere.
So what they want to optimize for is the way that they carry from A to B. So where they benefit here is actually the cloud, because the cloud has a very distributed data center network, which they could leverage oftentimes very close to the different driving locations. So they actually can benefit from those, eventually reducing the overall hardware or on prem data center capabilities that they are carrying from A to B and really reducing the benefiting from the distributed network of the cloud. But the data is oftentimes in their headquarters or in their test tracks where they have some kind of on prem capabilities and want to store the data because of data superiority reasons or because they want to have the centralized data lake on prem. So what they then do is when they drive to different races we, for example, support car racing teams with both either distributing the data that needs to go from the Headquarter to, for example, let’s say Singapore by the cloud via caching mechanisms that we can deploy.
Or the other way around, right? They are collecting data maybe from a race time and they need to rely on very fast decision making and some kind of advanced analytics tools. And there, they can also leverage the cloud. So they are collecting telemetry data or parametric data from the car and then pushing it directly to the cloud in order to do some kind of fast analytics and then push it back. So this whole workflow that I just described is basically what we can do in the car or in the automotive space based on the example of race cars or racing teams. So in a nutshell, we provide a very holistic hybrid cloud for those racing teams in order to get their data where it’s needed and distribute resources most efficiently across different environments types, such as on prem or cloud yeah, and ultimately help with the transfer by caching mechanisms to pre populate data fast, to accelerate the time to actually access the data but also with our advanced performance capabilities that we have natively in the cloud integrated.
Accelerate the run times of those analytics within the cloud. For example, Porsche Motorsport is relying on these kind of capabilities. BWT Alpine in the Formula One is another one, or Ducati, just to name three, who are using similar scenarios and relying on true hybrid cloud technology in here. And this is also where you see the benefit that NetApp provides, right? We have this one operating system, which is running on prem, but also across all hyperscalers. So it can help you to distribute the data where it’s needed at the right time to the right location, to the right person and ultimately help you with faster decision making and saving infrastructure costs as another example.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, the cloud aspect is interesting with all the different tracks because, in my opinion, the fastest way to move data is not having to move it at all. Right? If you’ve got it in the cloud, it’s already there.
And then you just attach a few FlexCaches to it on prem and now you’re localizing that access to that data as needed. If you need to move it, there’s SnapMirror, right? SnapMirror can transmit that data across to different sites. So you have a lot of options there for keeping that data either in place or moving it around.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, and the cloud can also help with another pillar that we discussed, right? Sustainability. So instead of acquiring all this hardware, you can set it up more efficiently, which ultimately also translates then into not only cost savings, but also a better ecological footprint.
Justin Parisi: Yeah, rather than having a hundred customers with a hundred data centers, you have a hundred customers sharing the same data center in the cloud.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah. Yeah. Correct.
Justin Parisi: So as far as the autonomous portion of that goes, I want to stick to the racing aspect cause that’s exciting for people, right? Now each track has a different profile, right?
They’re all different. I would imagine that racing teams leverage autonomous driving to create maps of these tracks to better optimize the routes that these drivers should take and create simulations. Is that an accurate portrayal of that?
Tilman Schroeder: In the domain of car racing, I’m not really sure, but simulation for autonomous driving is a very big topic because if you look at autonomous driving overall, autonomous driving or the development of autonomous driving consists of different processes step,. So first of all, you need to ingest the data from some kind of sensors. This is the first step to actually ingest data about, for example, a road or how you drive certain ways in order to feed the algorithm to learn. So the first process step is data ingestion. Then you need to train the data on your models. So that you feed the training algorithm with the different images, videos, and all of those other different LIDAR, for example, sensors sources and in order to optimize the algorithm to ultimately drive better than a human being, and succeed in there. And afterwards, what you’re doing then is validate what you’ve trained the algorithms. So instead of just putting the car again back on the road, you what you want to do is you want to test it in a computer simulation, because here you can accelerate the iteration times.
You can be very much faster in your research and development if you can just simulate what the algorithm would do. And this is the validation portion of it. From an infrastructure point of view, what you’re doing is you’re having high performance computing clusters, actually simulating like a computer game. And after that you need to retain the data that you have collected, and you need to have to archive the data, maybe back it up for later training purposes. So this is a very abstracted way on how the autonomous driving learning methodology or process looks like. And there are certain attributes that you need to think about when you develop this autonomous driving.
So first of all since it depends on different processes steps and it’s not that when it comes to talking about the environments, whether on prem or cloud, there’s not one, let’s say Holy Grail, which is like the preferred environment to actually train those, because if you collect the data directly from the car, you collect 50 terabytes per car per day ultimately, and you cannot just push it directly to the cloud. So the overall infrastructure where you’re building an autonomous vehicle needs to be hybrid in nature because there are some kind of physical constraints where you cannot just upload 50 terabytes of data per car per day just via WiFi or internet to the cloud.
That’s not very practical and infeasible because it would take weeks. So what you need there is some kind of on prem capabilities, and some kind of data center capabilities where you can offload the data first and best case do some pre-processing in terms of which data do I now need in order to then offload it to either some kind of on prem locations, co-locations, or hyperscaler where you then have the HPC farms or the GPUs where you can then run the training things in there.
So, very much hybrid in nature, right? Where NetApp with our value proposition, we are very good at it, because we’re natively integrated into all of the three hyperscalers, we are like a gateway where we can build true hybrid clouds with not yet another marketplace offering, but with integrating natively into the cloud ecosystem. Yeah, just to start with the data ingestion portion, which needs to be hybrid in nature and what we can bring in there. And if we follow those steps, for example, we also see that for the resimulation and validation portion where you need to run the simulations, oftentimes when it’s in the cloud, for example, you have some kind of Azure Badge or AWS Badge jobs running.
And on top of it, you often do have different Kubernetes services running with different simulation services that you want to test and validate. And for this, some kind of high performance file system in order to accelerate the time that it takes to actually run the simulations is very preferable.
And where you can then ultimately benefit from accelerating the time from the research stage to production. Those are just two examples of this overall process step within autonomous driving, where we can add value and ultimately accelerate research and development times and support our largest automotive companies to bring autonomous driving faster to the market and ultimately succeed.
Justin Parisi: So, as far as the cloud goes, we have several options. We have your do it yourself aspect where you can manage something like an Amazon AWS FSxN you have your Cloud Volumes ONTAP, and then you have your Storage as a Service, Azure NetApp Files, Cloud Volume Services.
Where do you see automotive customers leaning more towards when they’re deploying in the cloud? Are they wanting to manage it themselves more? Or are they looking for a simple to deploy, give me a quick volume and I’ll use that.
Tilman Schroeder: Based on my experience, they are looking for the simple to deploy option. However, the simple to deploy option oftentimes comes with costs. Let’s take an example, right? So there’s another shift going on currently in the automotive and manufacturing space when we talk about cloud, which is more in the field of product and engineering. What I mean by this is actually the design process of the car and listing all the different components and everything. There you have different software tools called product lifecycle management systems, which are oftentimes the backbone for car manufacturers. And what we see here is that there’s currently this shift going on of bringing this product lifecycle management tools to the cloud because you can benefit from higher innovative performance.
You can maybe connect your product lifecycle system to some kind of fancy machine learning services that are launched. Or you can just reduce costs because you can benefit of the distributed network costs of the cloud rather than maintaining and operating all this infrastructure by yourself. So we have this shift going on from PLMs moving to the cloud.
And then to your point, whether it’s self managed or they are looking for some kind of easy button where they can just consume these kinds of software components and focus on what they can do best manufacturing and building cars, right? This is what they want. However, practically speaking, this oftentimes look different because if you do that, then discussing software as a service versus infrastructure service approach, you notice that all those manufacturers have very much customized versions of the software that they’re running because everyone has unique needs. And once you start this customization discussion, you will quickly notice that the software as a service is not very practical, because it’s just the raw service without any further customization. So you see that especially the large OEMs and tier one suppliers in the automotive space. All of these will tell you that they prefer not to have just an easy button for your product lifecycle management system being hosted in the cloud, rather than have some kind of infrastructure as a service approach with smaller or larger customization in order to align better to the internal processes that they have developed over the years.
So yeah, I hope this answers your question, but it’s more like everybody’s looking for this easy button based on the example of product lifecycle management systems, but once you really come down to a thoughtful discussion on how to actually implement it, you will oftentimes notice that they need some kind of customized approach in there.
Justin Parisi: Yeah. Once you start getting into the customization discussions, the easy aspect kind of gets tossed out the window. Cause now it’s, Oh, I need to change things. And that defeats the purpose of having the easy button.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, fully agree on point. And I provided the example of product lifecycle management systems, which are currently moving to the cloud which are part of the solution area product and engineering, right?
Where those systems actually help you to develop. Or maybe I’m a bit off topic here, but we have a very strong value proposition there. That’s why I wanted to also touch this field a little bit Justin.
Justin Parisi: So yeah, it makes sense. I mean it’s still tangential to the automotive industry. I mean, other industries as well, but you know, everybody needs this stuff.
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah. So what we have now discussed is this connected aspect of autonomous driving. Those are the two pillars where hybrid is a very important capability that is needed in order to develop those service designs and architectures to actually run those connected car apps or train algorithms or validate autonomous driving algorithms.
But there’s also this other aspect, where it comes to product and engineering workloads, where cars are manufactured and designed and you also have to run computational fluid dynamics simulations on the chassis in order to understand how the form of a car actually has some impact on the aerodynamics and on the energy efficiency of the overall car. In this domain area, we see this massive shifts of companies currently migrating some of their. mission critical engineering workloads to the cloud because they can benefit from either the innovative performance that is happening there, they don’t need to maintain or operate the underlying infrastructure.
Sometimes it has economical reasons, because the license for the ISV is already integrated into the cloud credits, so we see this moving product lifecycle management systems or computer aided systems engineering simulations or computer aided design workloads to the cloud, and we have a very, very strong value proposition, because with our native cloud services, such as FSxN for NetApp ONTAP or Azure NetApp Files, we suit very well for these kind of workloads, because ultimately what you need there from a storage and infrastructure perspective, you need collaboration mechanisms that different distributed engineers worldwide can collaborate and work on similar files without having any kind of corruption of the data and having advanced file locking mechanisms.
And what you also need is ultimately some kind of necessary performance in order to run simulations faster and access those data faster, because you want to have the engineers that are actually conducting the design task or the simulation task as productive as possible.
And that’s why you need a very intelligent data infrastructure, also in the cloud. In the automotive industry, what is currently happening is a huge paradigm shift and new competition arises such as Build your Dreams, which is currently one of the largest automotive electric manufacturers basically coming out of nowhere.
So we have a high degree of competition and the only way in order to succeed in this highly competitive field is to have very modern infrastructure foundations where you can then accelerate operations, accelerate research to develop times ultimately reduce any kind of operational costs. This is where we can help.
Justin Parisi: All right, Tilman. So a lot of good information here about the automotive industry, a lot of interesting aspects to it that we don’t really think about every day. So If I wanted to find more information about NetApp and the automotive industry, where would I do that?
Tilman Schroeder: Yeah, there are different paths where you can find additional information.
First of all, check our NetApp website and look for industries and then automotive where you find our focus workloads and our case studies where we support our customers or just visit blog.netapp.com, and just type in automotive or whatever is interesting to you.
Justin Parisi: We’ll include links in the blog as well. So you don’t have to go searching for that if you don’t want to.
And we can find you on LinkedIn as well as through email, right?
Tilman Schroeder: Sure. Just add me on LinkedIn and reach out, post a question. Let’s start a discussion, right? So it’s Tilman Schröeder at LinkedIn, and also via email tilman.schroeder@netapp.com.
I know German name might be difficult but yeah, just read the caption.
Justin Parisi: That’s one of the easier German names.
Tilman Schroeder: Okay. Yeah.
Justin Parisi: Alright, well thanks so much for joining us today and talking to us all about the automotive industry and how NetApp can help that.
Alright, that music tells me it’s time to go. If you’d like to get in touch with us, send us an email to podcast@netapp.com or send us a tweet @NetApp.
As always, if you’d like to subscribe, find us on iTunes. Spotify, Google Play, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or via techontappodcast.com. If you liked the show today, leave us a review. On behalf of the entire Tech ONTAP podcast team, I’d like to thank Tilman Schroeder for joining us today. As always, thanks for listening.
Podcast intro/outro: [Outro]
Why Is The Internet Broken? 