How OEMs Can Become the Automakers of Tomorrow

As we at Pure Storage continue to expand our investments into the Automotive industry, we sponsored another automotive event, Automotive USA 2023, being held November 8-9 in Detroit. This followed our presence at AutoTech Detroit. 

AutoTech was a great event that gathered a lot of automakers and ecosystem partners, and Automotive USA was just as exciting. As the auto industry is rapidly modernizing, digitizing, and becoming more software-centric, it’s appropriate that the theme for the show was “Become the Automaker of Tomorrow.” 

The show’s core topic areas were use cases that Pure is already helping automakers with today:

• Accelerating electrification
• Innovating in software
• Transforming manufacturing

Let’s look at each one. 

Accelerating Electrification 

Auto electrification is a broad topic area that covers designing and building electric vehicles, battery technology, charging technology, connectivity, user experience, and massive amounts of data, software, and AI. While there is no single technology use case here, at its core electrification is a data-centric and software-defined effort. For that you need storage that’s fast, scalable, reliable and—maybe most importantly—easily managed at scale. 

In the massively competitive automotive industry that includes both new and traditional OEMs, there’s no time to waste. IT departments need to be incredibly agile, because projects start and stop, new breakthroughs lead to shifts in direction, and storage needs can change unexpectedly, such as moving from file-based to object-based AI. 

In this IT climate, Pure shines because it’s the easiest storage to use, especially at scale, and our flexible subscription models mean you’re not stuck if you overbuy for a project that suddenly changes scope or direction. You pay only for what you use, when you need it. 

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Innovating in Software 

Nothing is more vital to automakers now than software. As McKinsey notes, “Automakers that lack sufficient software capabilities will face major risks, including start-of-production delays and budget overruns. They may also fall further behind competitors.” 

Software impacts everything, and legacy automakers face a two-pronged problem.. First, they have a large amount of IT debt and older application stacks that won’t meet current needs. And second, automotive software is getting more complex, not less. 

While it’s true that there are many challenges Pure Storage can’t help with—developer talent acquisition is probably the most significant—it might be surprising to see just how many areas we CAN help in. I hope to dive deeper into this area in later blogs, but for now here’s a quick view with links to more details.  

• Container Management: Many IT departments are not well versed in how to provide persistent storage and services like backup and data portability for Kubernetes. It’s just different, and the old ways of doing things don’t work. Portworx® by Pure Storage is a one-stop-shop to simplify your move to containers. 
• Automation: Pure Storage is API-first storage, and supports multiple automation frameworks and scripting tools like Ansible, Jenkins, Python and more. You can find them all at our developer community site. 
• Software Repositories: Performance matters—a LOT—for software development. Pure can massively speed up software cycles for software repository tools like Perforce and JFrog Artifactory. 

Transforming Manufacturing 

The new world of automotive manufacturing will be much more AI-driven and full of sensors, IoT, real-time quality control analytics, digital twins, and more. All of it is data-heavy and highly demanding on storage performance. Whether ultra-low latency for databases or mega bandwidth for AI and analytics, storage will be stressed like never before. 

In addition, reliability is critical. Storage downtime means production line downtime, and that can cost millions of dollars an hour. It’s not acceptable. 

Pure delivers on all fronts, with FlashArray//XL™ for the ultimate in low latency and FlashBlade//S™ for massively parallel bandwidth. Both are exceptionally reliable and can be upgraded non disruptively, so you don’t even have “planned downtime.”

We Loved Seeing You at Automotive USA

We had multiple experts on-hand who discussed the topics above as well as anything else automotive IT related.  In addition, we sponsored a session on “Collect, Label, Train, Simulate, Validate, and Drive: Accelerating the AI Development Data Pipeline for Autonomous, Software-Defined Vehicles,” and shared the stage with Pure customer Ghost Autonomy, an autonomous driving software maker. 

To learn more about how Pure Storage helps automakers, read our Automotive Point of View white paper.