ZF Friedrichshafen AG spurs innovation

ZF Friedrichshafen AG has implemented software-defined infrastructure solutions from SUSE. As competition in the automotive sector is revving up, the race is on to hit the market with innovative new products, such as self-driving cars that rely on cutting-edge Internet of Things technology. ZF Friedrichshafen AG is no exception; it has partnered with graphics specialist NVIDIA to develop intelligent autonomous driving systems. The systems will enable passenger cars and commercial trucks to understand their environments by using deep learning to process sensor data. To spur rapid development of these innovative offerings, ZF has deployed SUSE OpenStack Cloud, enabling developers to spin up new test environments in minutes rather than days. By introducing automated provisioning and granting developers self-service capabilities, ZF has freed up its highly-qualified IT team to focus on driving real business value.

 

To design, build and test state-of-the-art components for these first-of-a-kind offerings, ZF relies on computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools. As the company often creates multiple iterations of a single component, the ability to rapidly spin up new development environments, or let existing systems scale-out into the dynamic OpenStack environment to give the users enough resources during usage peaks to reduce computing times. ZF set out to find a platform that could help it make development as fast and cost-effective as possible. ZF decided early on to take advantage of efficient OpenStack technology, and then began its search for the right OpenStack distribution.

 

Harald Holder, director of IT server services at ZF, said: “We wanted to give our developers maximum flexibility in terms of the tools and APIs they use, so it was imperative to avoid them being locked into using proprietary applications. With that in mind, we decided to go for an open-source solution. We opted for SUSE OpenStack Cloud because it delivers the latest innovations in enterprise quality in a cost-effective manner and because SUSE is a trusted brand in the open-source realm. In addition, we already had a strong relationship with SUSE from running our mission-critical enterprise applications on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.”

 

Using SUSE OpenStack Cloud, ZF established a private cloud environment, providing a flexible platform to support its software developers. When developers require a new environment – for example, to test some freshly written code – they can set one up on a self-service basis using automated provisioning. ZF now also runs resource-intensive Engineering simulations on SUSE OpenStack Cloud, partially replacing dedicated pools of hardware. To store data in its SUSE OpenStack Cloud environment, ZF relies on SUSE Enterprise Storage, a software-defined storage solution that provides unified object, file and block storage.

 

Just a few months after deployment, SUSE OpenStack Cloud is already delivering impressive benefits to ZF. Markus Forster, project lead at ZF Cloud, said: “In the past, developers had to wait a few days for a new test environment – now, they have the resources they need available within a few minutes of making the request.”

 

Forster continues: “Furthermore, with SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage, we’re able to offer self-service (and -responsibility) driven virtual data centres to our customers, which reduces the amount of shadow IT while keeping up the governance. The pay-as-you-go chargeback model is a welcome new offer for our internal customers.”

 

The improvement is particularly marked in CAE simulations, for which the company’s previous infrastructure was costly to maintain, sometimes sat idle, and often had a long queue of jobs at peak times. Now, ZF benefits from faster performance and a reduced need for hardware investment.

 

Harald Holder said: “We believe that the future lies in infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, enabled by OpenStack and other forward-thinking solutions. Big Data workloads running on Hadoop increasingly also use our OpenStack Environment ramping up our analytics capabilities. We have made a strategic decision to continue expanding our OpenStack environment. In particular, we plan to establish a cloud spanning many locations to enable developers across our global business to select and deploy compute resources in an efficient, automated manner.”