Case Study: NIO achieves scalable, automated container-native storage for massive autonomous-vehicle data with Portworx

How NIO Built a Cutting Edge Autonomous Vehicle Platform on Top of Containers

NIO, a mobility company developing Level 2 and Level 4 autonomous electric vehicles, faced an enormous data challenge: each vehicle can produce 12–24 TB of data per day (projected ~120 PB/year) and required the ability to scale compute and storage independently on bare-metal containers while running stateful services on Kubernetes and Mesosphere DC/OS. To solve immature container storage and data-management gaps, NIO selected Portworx for a cloud-native storage and data management layer integrated with their container schedulers.

Portworx provided dynamic provisioning, high availability, snapshots, backup, encryption and tight scheduler integration, enabling NIO to run Cassandra, Kafka, HDFS, Spark, TensorFlow and other stateful workloads on commodity servers with near-bare-metal performance. With Portworx, NIO rapidly scaled infrastructure to support ramped vehicle production, achieved the required density and workload isolation, and deployed a production platform that ingests terabytes-per-vehicle per day with a lean team (15 engineers, 3 systems engineers).

NIO

Satya Komala

Head Of Autonomous Vehicle Cloud & Enterprise Architecture