Transport Systems Catapult

Transport Systems Catapult uses Scality RING to advance intelligent mobility

Scality RING helps TSC bridge the gap between academic innovation and its industrial exploitation to build the future of transport systems

One of ten elite technology and innovation centers established and overseen by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) was created to drive and promote intelligent mobility. By using new and emerging technologies to transport people and goods more intelligently and efficiently, TSC accelerates smarter living, traveling and business growth, enabling new levels of physical, digital and social connectedness.

TSC engages with academic networks, diverse SME ecosystems, businesses and government departments as it seeks to foster new markets, boost demand for innovation and increase the supply of proven products and services across transport, cities, towns and villages.

At its core, TSC aims to bridge the gap between the UK’s world-leading academic innovation and its industrial exploitation.

The challenge

Amassing data is key to developing and advancing intelligent mobility — intelligent anything, in fact. TSC had acquired a massive number of data sets and were unsure of how much they wanted to store in their intelligent mobility data hub.

They needed a flexible solution that would allow for growth as they procure more and more data sets. Having a secure, open and limitlessly scalable data store was mission-critical.

HPE and Scality were interested in what we were trying to achieve and really took time to understand our requirements before offering up a solution.

Alex Farr

IT director, Transport Systems Catapult

The outcome

As an innovation company, it was important to TSC that their partners be forward-thinking and innovative themselves. Scality and HPE were the perfect fit.

TSC shares the data that they’ve amassed from sensors, geospatial modeling, autonomous vehicle testing and more with scientists who access collected data, copy it to their compute clusters to run analytics, then push results back into Scality RING for archive. Two-site replication combined with Scality’s robust erasure coding algorithms enable storage efficiency while ensuring data durability. Data availability is there when scientists need it.

“A lot of systems evolve with you, so you end up thinking about security, resilience and disaster recovery down the line. What we’ve done here is built it in from the outset — the solution from Scality and HPE has allowed us to do that. We worked very closely with them to ensure that those elements were built in by design,”

Alex Farr

IT director, Transport Systems Catapult

Scality’s strong data resiliency model — the fact that erasure coding and replication are mixed within TSC’s infrastructure — provides the highest level of durability and availability. With the loss of one site, or even the loss of one site and part of the second site, work can continue as the data remains highly available and durable.