Klas, a developer of edge intelligence solutions, says it has integrated an ingest receptacle into its TRX D8 datalogger for the Dell PowerEdge R7525 rack server, marking its official entry into the Dell Autonomous Drive Ecosystem.
The TRX D8 is an in-vehicle storage and compute system designed to log the petabytes of data collected by autonomous test vehicles. Integrating it with the PowerEdge R7525 rack server will, says Klas, give OEMs an end-to-end solution for the daily data collection, storage and transfer required for autonomous vehicle development.
According to Klas, the design of the TRX D8 allows it to constantly collect data from onboard Ethernet and CAN and store up to 240 terabytes of data in one easy-to-remove cassette. This allows technicians to swap cassettes easily and rapidly so they can get test rigs back on the road and continue testing systems and collecting more data. The ingest receptacle holds as many as eight D8 cassettes, which effectively gives OEMs the ability to concurrently ingest 1,920 terabytes of data directly into the Dell PowerEdge R72525 rack server with secure backup in the cloud.
Although this is Klas’s first collaboration with Dell for autonomous vehicles, the two companies have collaborated on several projects dating back to 2017, all of which have centered on bringing enterprise data center technology to the edge.
“Dell servers are widely recognized as some of the most consistent and most reliable on the market, and the company has a long history of supporting infrastructures based on merit rather than a closed-loop system,” said Frank Murray, CTO of Klas. “We are firm believers in the power of open systems and admire Dell’s commitment to supporting an open ecosystem.”
Murray continued, “Autonomous vehicle development requires so many moving parts, and Dell’s approach gives OEMs flexibility in creating an end-to-end data management solution, which accelerates development and time-to-market while reducing both cost and risk.”
The TRX D8 features a rugged design to ensure optimal performance in extreme environments and maximize the amount of time test vehicles can stay in the field. Its compute element runs on Klas’s field-proven operating system, KlasOS Keel, which is specifically designed to accommodate the security and reliability needs for edge locations.
Klas states that it chose the R7525 rack server because it is built on a scalable system architecture and provides the flexibility needed to meet open-ended performance demands. Its specifications include:
- 2U rack-mounted server, 4U ingest receptacle. Supports two ingest receptacles per ingest server
- Generation 4 RAID card support for enhanced storage performance
- Supports Open Compute Project (OCP) 2 x 100Gbps NICs for faster data offload. InfiniBand supported
