General Motors (GM) has a plan to limit the size of future safety recalls. How? By bringing software development in-house and creating a large supercomputing data center. GM is aggressively moving forward with ways to serve its customers better by bringing more computer technology and power “inside” with storage-led infrastructure. There are three immediate measures that come to mind: speeding up analysis, streamlining operations and cutting costs.

Speeding Up Analysis

 
On Monday GM tackled one of the three, by opening a giant data storage center in suburban Warren, Michigan. In the past, GM tracked problems by regional operations, but there were absolutely no streamlined processes with GM’s worldwide footprint. Engineers did not have a way to share or test their problems against a global infrastructure. Couple the new data storage unit mentioned above with software developed by GM’s ‘innovation centers’, and GM is able to address problems from across the globe and quickly assign the right engineering team to fix the problem. In turn, GM is a more streamlined and cost-cutting company.

Streamlined Operations

 
The benefits of integrating software-defined storage (SDS) are largely highlighted by increased speed and agility. There is noticeable improvement in the ability to manage resources and SLIs from a system perspective. Additionally, GM is able to deploy and update existing applications; while also writing new applications with orders of magnitude more information available in real-time. By bringing this software development “in-house”, GM improves its agility, speed to deploy and speed to change. SDS’s will contribute to improved end-user productivity which will reduce IT costs.

Cutting Costs

 
Gartner reported that 94% of IT departments are either considering or undertaking a data center migration program. Cumbersome physical units being commoditized and virtualized either in the cloud and/or with software-defined storage. In the report, Gartner illustrates that data center migration is one of the most effective ways to lower operations costs in a company’s data center. With a successfully executed program, it estimates that businesses can save up to 23 percent. The Server migration is upon us. GM is taking the lead in better understanding its technology environment moving forward.

Software-defined storage plays a key part in the software-defined evolution of the automobile industry. Efficiency, costs savings and better execution in real-time stand to make more fuel-efficient and safer cars.