BMW is not an IT company, and yet it has confirmed that it is building its own data centre in Iceland. So why would a car company make such an investment? Would it not be easier to pay for a 24/7 environmentally-friendly managed service offered by one of the major experienced data centre providers?
Mario Müller grins. Were it so easy, says BMW’s Vice President of IT Infrastructure, the OEM would be happy to do that. “But our requirements mean we need to have our own data centre right now,” he explains. “Of course, we’re not an IT company! We build, develop and sell cars and motorbikes. And we have a great financial services organisation. We currently have more than three million cars connected to our IT infrastructure. I think it will be more than ten million by 2020. We give our customers real time traffic information. That means every three minutes all our cars receive an update. This really takes those of us from the IT side into the end-user business, instead of only serving the company’s internal IT needs. Sales are going pretty well so we’re happy about that. The customers like our products and the service that we offer them. More than 95% of our new cars will have built-in technology to get them online and connected, so it depends then how many cars we sell.”
BMW currently operates an enterprise data centre in Munich, Germany. It also has regional data centres in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Oxford in the UK, and in South Africa to support its manufacturing operations. “You need equipment on the plant side for latency reasons,” he explains.
In 2012, BMW had around one million connected cars on the road, and was receiving over one million data requests each day. At the time, this was equivalent to 600MB of data per day. The company now has three million connected cars on the road, and looking beyond 2018, it is expecting to have 10 million connected cars making over 100 million data requests each day. That equates to 1TB of data every day, and it is because of this growth in ConnectedDrive and other services that BMW is so keen to create what it calls its own ‘Private Cloud’.
Carbon-free clouds
The OEM has already been using Verne Global’s data centre on a former NATO base in Keflavik, Iceland – the host country of its future data centre. The Keflavik site currently hosts high-performance computing (HPC) applications such as crash test simulations, CAD/CAE, and aerodynamic and liquid fuel calculations. The OEM is now building its own data centre near Reykjavik, where it will host its Private Cloud. This will be capable of accommodating the existing crash test and other simulations, as well as the rising demand for connected car-related data. “We have a green energy data centre in Iceland where we are currently running five high performance computer cells. Each cell has approximately 130 servers. We’re expanding that up to ten cells by the end of 2013. The data centre there is 100% carbon free, and that is important if you’re talking about carbon emissions, especially for an auto company.”
A cold climate and an abundance of environmentally-friendly energy sources make Iceland an ideal location for data centres; natural air is used to cool the servers, and electricity is 100% carbon-neutral thanks to hydro and geothermal power. Ten HPC cells consume 6.31GWh of power annually, says BMW; running such cells in Germany would create 3,570 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Once the new data centre is in place, will BMW’s investment in cloud computing be noticed by its customers? “I hope so, because one of the biggest challenges that we have, whether it’s for the company itself or for our customers, is for our solutions to have the best possible resilience. We have pretty good quality in the company on the IT side. For instance, data availability in 2012 was above 99.96% of the entire availability around the world. That’s a very good result from my point of view. On the other hand, our plants are running at 120% capacity right now and it’s pretty hard to get downtime for any maintenance or patches that are necessary, so we need solutions that do not require any maintenance. Maintenance is a planned incident, from my point of view, because IT availability is not there for a given amount of time. The solutions that we have to build have to be more resilient, with real zero downtime, and always up for the customer, whether internal or external.”
Car companies are notoriously slow at catching up with technology that may not be directly related to the vehicle, and Müller wholeheartedly believes that the industry must keep up.
“I think you could always be further ahead! Agility and speed will be more and more important in the future. You have to be fast. You have to offer what a customer wants, and get it implemented without working 12 or 24 months to get something done. The technology that we see right now in the car environment gives us this opportunity to develop our products much faster. You just get the infrastructure online and in a minute everything works. You can do the test there, get an implementation, and it’s horizontally scalable. It gives you the resilience that you need. Besides that, in the BMW Group, we also have financial services. That’s a different environment from the manufacturing, development or sales environment, so we have to cover everything. It’s a wonderful situation because we get information and ideas from other colleagues across the company, and it’s easier to understand their needs, and what we have to implement to serve them.”
Cloud computing is growing rapidly. GM has recently invested in a large data centre in the US, and is constructing a second. Long term, OEMs’ ownership of cloud data storage could potentially change the way cars interact with their drivers, and other vehicles.
“The BMW Group is leading edge. All the other OEMs will have to do it sooner rather than later. That will lead to greater enhancement in the future. If you think about highly, or even fully autonomous driving in the future, you need much more capacity in the back-end and it is not possible to host everything in the car. That might be too expensive for the customer. So IT working together with colleagues in the development department on the electronic side is the future, from my point of view.”
Server capability
The rapid rise in connected car data requests raises the question of whether the server capacity exists to support the growing number of connected cars and the vast quantities of data that are expected to be transferred in 2015 and 2020. “Right now, I think we are pretty well prepared to handle everything through to 2015 or 2016. But there will come a time, if you’re thinking about highly autonomous driving, when you need more capacity around the world, so we have to think about how that will work for us in the future.”
Autonomous cars have added a new dimension to the number and type of automotive data requests. There is growing industry acceptance that, from 2020, we will see cars with some autonomous driving capability on our roads. This will require considerable on-board and off-board computing power. Müller believes the company has sufficient server capability for the ConnectedDrive services that BMW currently offers; however, when it comes to autonomous driving, he says changes and new technology will be required to support such functions
Nissan has promised to launch self-driving cars by 2020. Daimler’s Dieter Zetsche was driven on stage at the 2013 Frankfurt motor show (IAA) by an autonomous car, and Mercedes-Benz has run the S 500 Intelligent Drive autonomously over 100km through normal traffic in Germany. Despite testing such technology, BMW, an OEM which prides itself on the driving experience, has so far been quiet on plans to launch autonomous cars.
“For BMW, both [autonomous driving and the driving experience] are important. First of all, if you would like to drive yourself, you should have a great car with great acceleration and great handling for real driving pleasure. On the other hand, there are situations, maybe in heavy traffic in the morning, when you don’t want to drive yourself, and you would like other solutions. BMW is leading edge in technology. You will see something in the future from us in autonomous driving.”
At the GENIVI Alliance’s recent event in San Diego, Open Automotive 13, John Ellis, Ford’s Global Technologist and Head of the Ford Developer Program, called Ford an IT company. Look at the IT activities at some of the major OEMs, and his comment might soon apply to the broader automotive industry. Contract IT staff are being hired as salaried staff; IT departments are being moved from the back-room into the customer-end of the business; and OEMs are beginning to see data centres as profit centres rather than cost centres.
BMW: the only automotive OEM in the ODCA
The Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA) was established in 2010, to speed up the migration to cloud computing and to provide pan-industry support for the world’s rapidly growing data centre and cloud computing requirements. The ODCA now has over 300 member companies, and is led by a Steering Committee comprised of 12 global IT leaders: BMW, Capgemini, China Life, China Unicom Group, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, National Australia Bankl, Terremark, UBS and The Walt Disney Company.
BMW is currently the only automotive company in the ODCA, but Mario Müller, BMW’s Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Chairman of the Open Data Centre Alliance (ODCA), says he expects other OEMs to join in the near future. “We are working together with other car companies around the world, and I think one or the other will join us in the next few years. Working together, sharing our experience is important for everybody. It’s also great for us to work with other industries.” OEMs and suppliers, says Müller, “are happily invited to join us and will help us to work together, especially in the IT area, and bring us the solutions that we need.”
Interoperability is one of the key drivers in the Open Data Centre Alliance. “It’s a vibrant organisation. It’s growing. And the output is there – it’s not just an organisation where we drink great coffee. There is work involved. People work together in groups and the tech groups develop documents and share information. They’re doing all the tests there, and sharing results. We also appreciate the role that Intel has in the Open Data Centre Alliance, as a technical advisor to all member organisations.”
“The benefit of being a member for BMW is that we get great information from our colleagues working together with us,” says Müller, “that we define and specify the usages together; and that we will get solutions from providers based on the ODCA’s requirements.”
Centering on data
GM opened its first in-house data centre in 2013 in Warren, Michigan, with an investment of US$130m; construction of a second US$100m data centre expansion in Milford, Michigan began in the summer of 2013, and is expected to be operational by 2015. The investments are part of GM’s ‘digital transformation’ strategy, designed to give the OEM full control of its IT by consolidating its 23 previously outsourced global data centres into two by 2015.
Air flow, temperature control and energy consumption are key issues for any data centre. GM’s investment has been designed to reduce the OEM’s enterprise IT infrastructure energy consumption by 70%, and the OEM’s focus on environmentally-friendly construction at the GM Warren Enterprise Data Center resulted in a LEED gold award. Likewise, Honda’s North American Data Center in Longmont, Colorado is able to use outside air around 40% of the time to cool equipment.
BMW and GM are investing heavily in data centres, but they are not alone in making major IT changes. Others include Ford Motor Company, which is in the process of consolidating six enterprise data centres into two; and Audi, which opened a new 9,000 square metre data centre at its Ingolstadt, Germany facility in 2012.
Martin Kahl is the Editor of Automotive World
