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…
This is an excerpt of an article which was first published in the Q4 issue of Megatrends magazine, to continue reading, simply download your free copy now, and turn to page 46.
