Creating a Hybrid Data-Storage Solution Using Amazon S3 File Gateway with Apollo Tyres

Apollo Tyres is a multinational tire manufacturing company that sells tires to consumers and industrial customers in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and construction. It has seven manufacturing units: five in India and two in Europe.

The company manufactures over 5.5 million tires annually, and to meet regional regulatory requirements, it needs to store tire genealogy, quality assurance, and R&D data—which may consist of visual, SCADA, manufacturing system, and test results data—for 7–15 years after manufacturing. Apart from compliance and audits, that data is used to improve product quality and for causal analysis in defect remediation. With the gradual shift in the IT landscape from on-premises to the cloud, Apollo Tyres also planned to move its growing data storage requirements to Amazon S3.

By making Amazon S3 available to local systems in its plant, Apollo Tyres fulfilled data storage requirements and helped resolve the capacity-constraint issues of network attached storage (NAS). In one case of such issues that involved a manufacturing unit, the data storage was full, and the unit had 2 days’ worth of manufacturing waiting to begin but nowhere to store the image data. To meet the pressing need, Apollo Tyres set up Amazon S3 File Gateway and mapped it onto the required servers for that facility within 1 day.

Amazon S3 File Gateway is a hybrid storage solution that meets Apollo Tyres’ image, storage, and security needs. The solution can also be accessed from the company’s global locations. The company had already used AWS for its data lake and Internet of Things solutions, and after Amazon S3 File Gateway proved successful in a proof of concept at its Limda plant, Apollo Tyres implemented the service for other plants.

Apollo Tyres has used Amazon S3 to store over 160 TB of data via Amazon S3 File Gateway, and three of its biggest plants are the top users of the service. Thus, the company can achieve a virtually unlimited scale of storage and has started using this scalability in other aspects of its business, including storing data for its finance and customer excellence teams.

Migrating data was a smooth process that involved using storage migration solutions and copying files after deploying Amazon S3 File Gateway. “We were able to set up Amazon S3 File Gateway within 1 day—a seamless migration without interruption to the business,” says Shailender Gupta, global head of cloud infrastructure at Apollo Tyres.

Through the migration project, Apollo Tyres is overcoming resistance to change, improving the user experience, and facilitating future innovations with cloud technology. The company had already migrated its enterprise resource planning to AWS for automatic scaling. When it adopted Amazon S3 File Gateway, Apollo Tyres demonstrated to users that it would work like the previous on-premises solution but with increased scalability, lower costs, and a smaller on-premises physical footprint.

Apollo Tyres uses Amazon S3 File Gateway to store files as objects in Amazon S3 using the industry-standard file protocols Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB). The company then accesses the files either through the same protocols from its data center or as objects directly in Amazon S3. Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) metadata—including ownership, permissions, and time stamps—is durably stored in Amazon S3 in the user metadata of the object associated with a file. “By implementing Amazon S3 File Gateway, we significantly simplified our data architecture, reduced the capital investment on buying extra NAS system capacity, and improved manageability while retaining the ability to retrieve data in milliseconds,” says Gupta. “In addition, Amazon S3 provides legal lock and versioning for sensitive data.” (See Figure 1 below.)

Apollo Tyres deployed a local installation of Amazon S3 File Gateway in each of its global plant locations and its head office. To reduce network latency, the company hosts its Amazon S3 buckets in specific AWS Regions according to the source of the data.

By deploying Amazon S3 File Gateway globally, Apollo Tyres centralized the management of its infrastructure, reducing the need for onsite support and saving the upfront cost of annual maintenance contracts. It also reduced downtime of storage systems and improved plant uptime. Overall, Apollo Tyres reduced the costs of data backup by 90 percent in three of its largest plants and expects to complete a full rollout to the remaining plants by the end of 2024.

Apollo Tyres uses Amazon S3 bucket replication to avoid data loss by copying data to other AWS Regions, thus providing redundancy. “Amazon S3 is a highly reliable, trusted, and cost-effective service. It offers many safeguards to protect our business-critical data, and we fully trust it for our data storage requirements—that too at a significantly lower cost with its S3 Glacier storage class, for data that is not needed frequently,” says Gupta.

After migrating most of its legacy data, Apollo Tyres is looking to further optimize and modernize its manufacturing processes using advanced cloud technologies. Benefiting from scalable, reliable, and fast data access via Amazon S3 File Gateway, the company’s R&D teams can now use large volumes of data within the AWS compute environment to innovate faster.

“While test machines produce data in our R&D labs, the large volume of data is now available near the large compute environment,” says Gupta. Thus, teams can analyze big data faster by accessing Amazon S3 data via Amazon EMR—a cloud big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning using open-source frameworks—and Amazon SageMaker—which can be used to build, train, and deploy machine learning models for any use case. “Our R&D team has welcomed the solution and is looking forward to implementing high-performance computing in the AWS cloud,” says Gupta. “Using AWS, we can scale as needed on the latest and most modern hardware and avoid locking ourselves into obsolete technologies as was the case with on-premises systems.”