How the Cloud with HPE GreenLake will help the BMW Group develop electric vehicles.
BMW Group is turning to the cloud to help manage data from around the world in its pursuit of electric vehicle (EV) innovation. The carmaker has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) GreenLake’s edge-to-cloud platform to consolidate and streamline this data management.
HPE GreenLake will provide cloud services for big data, backup, recovery, and compliant archiving. This will enable the auto giant to manage distributed data through one single platform that will deliver a consistent cloud experience anywhere in the world.
BMW will use HPE GreenLake to make it easier to analyze data collected from the carmaker’s EV test vehicles—information such as battery temperature, power dissipation, and vehicle speed, among other metrics, will be collected.
What Is HPE GreenLake?
HPE GreenLake is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that brings cloud functionality to a company’s cloud-native and non-cloud native apps and data. The idea is that no matter where the data or app is located in the company’s technology architecture, the company can streamline how it collects, shares, and analyzes data. GreenLake users are also provided with a suite of services including analytics, HPC, and data protection.
BMW Group’s data will be captured by HPE Ezmeral, an analytics and lakehouse platform under the GreenLake umbrella. Ezmeral will enable the carmaker’s data scientists and engineers to access the data regardless of where it is stored. It also provides them with a global catalogue of analytics tools and data-operations processes to analyze the data and run simulations. This solution will be delivered as a GreenLake service, based on HPE Apollo and HPE ProLiant servers in globally distributed micro datacenters, with a virtual desktop infrastructure.
Ezmeral is one of HPE GreenLake’s 50-plus cloud services that can run on-premises, at the edge, in a colocation facility, or on the public cloud. It includes an enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and analytics experience with a cloud-native architecture and supports open-source data science tools, AI accelerators, and frameworks.
GreenLake will also enable BMW’s researchers to use products from HPE partners. These include backup and recovery from Veritas and Cohesity, in combination with HPE Store Once, and compliant archiving solutions from iTernity based on HPE Primera.
“While data is becoming a key source of competitive advantage in the automotive industry, the complexity of data management is only increasing, driven by decentralization and increasing volume, variety, and velocity,” said Antonio Neri, CEO and President of HPE. “We look forward to working with the BMW Group to master that challenge by providing a unified cloud experience for the management of any data anywhere which is a powerful foundation for unlocking its value.”
HPE GreenLake enables businesses to make their critical applications accessible from on site, at the edge, and in colocation centers—giving businesses the visibility, control, and performance of the hybrid cloud while keeping the apps and data secure.
Using the Cloud for Electric Vehicle Development
By tapping HPE to help power the collection and analysis of EV data, BMW Group is betting on the capabilities of cloud computing to help develop and refine their electric vehicles and accelerate the process of getting them to market, while making sure data is available and compliant globally.
The cloud seems to be a natural home for EV development data as carmakers are becoming data-hungry in an effort to push forward new and more sophisticated products.
The innovations that the electric vehicle sector has produced aren’t limited to just the vehicle’s power source. The breakthroughs in battery capacity and range have been accompanied by innovations in autonomous driving as well as features such as navigation, vehicle diagnostics, infotainment, and other safety and sensor-based functions.
The push for autonomous driving is a notable factor in this trend; autonomous driving and electric vehicles seem to be developing hand-in-hand. Autonomous driving technologies integrate easier with EVs than with conventional vehicles. EVs are easier for computers to drive; most of them are equipped with drive-by-wire systems rather than traditional mechanical control systems, creating a more flexible and compatible platform for autonomous tech.
Data is collected by carmakers like BMW Group to inform and enhance the vehicle design. Over time, as more and more data are collected, the vehicle’s software and performance can be improved. Since the safety of the user can be impacted, it’s paramount that the data is safe and reliable.
Could More EV Manufacturers Move to the Cloud?
As EVs move towards more sophisticated levels of autonomous driving, they are only going to increase demand for data—essentially becoming mobile data collection, storage, and analysis platforms. EVs, especially autonomous ones, will generate terabytes of data per day; the majority will be sensory and diagnostic data for driving, but additional data is increasingly being collected by the vehicle thanks to mobility and digital services integration with EVs.
BMW was an early EV innovator with its i3 model, which debuted in 2013 and ended its production run in 2021. By partnering with HPE to bring its EV development efforts to the cloud, the carmaker looks to continue pushing the boundaries in a field that’s growing in sophistication and demands for data. It wouldn’t be surprising if other vehicle manufacturers followed suit, tapping into the power of the cloud to accelerate their own EV innovations.
Read more about how businesses are moving to the cloud at Do Even More with Your CFD Workloads in the Cloud.