Jaguar Land Rover has begun using Storage Made Easy’s Cloud Drive in the Google Cloud, enabling critical file system-oriented applications to access data stored securely on Google Object Storage.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) uses National Instrument’s DataFinder to index and analyze over a terabyte of newly created time-series data each day. The data is generated from test drive sensors and measurements, and ad hoc measurements from 400 dataloggers in the powertrain calibration and controls department. It is then and saved directly on Google Cloud Storage. The challenge has been how to take advantage of the cloud for increased durability and agility when the application can only index and manage data from file-based storage systems.

The Storage Made Easy Google Storage Drive allows applications, and end users, to connect to Google Cloud Storage as if it was a local read-write hierarchical file system. The drive allows JLR to move its data management and analytics platform to Google Cloud with minimal migration costs.

The Cloud Drive is optimized for large data sets and deep folder hierarchies and does not obfuscate object metadata, allowing concurrent access by apps directly to Google Cloud Storage.

Maxime Lecuona, power train calibration and controls data processing team leader at Jaguar Land Rover, said: “Moving our infrastructure to Google Cloud is a critical project for us. We are planning on leveraging this new platform to gain in flexibility and ultimately provide our services to a wider portion of the company. Storage Made Easy’s Google Storage Drive is allowing us to transfer our current infrastructure to this new environment with minimal change to the existing code, and at a very reasonable price.”

Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy CEO, said: “Cloud technology is undoubtedly a great way for companies to free up IT to concentrate on innovation, but there is still a need to bridge the gap between remote cloud storage and critical business applications, and this is what the Storage Made Easy solutions provides.”

Storage Made Easy is already offering native drives for all major object storage, allowing users to interact with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack Swift or Google Cloud Storage through familiar interfaces.