News Facts

Mazda Motor Corporation has modernized and consolidated its Mazda Digital Innovation (MDI) system on Oracle's SPARC T4-4 and T4-2 servers running Oracle Solaris 10.

The MDI system is critical to Mazda product development and provides technologies which span the entire process from planning and development to manufacturing new cars, including 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Product Data Management (PDM), and other IT tools.

Over time, Mazda's MDI system, originally launched in 1996, began to experience performance issues and challenges with server resource allocation, efficiency, and cost.

To address these challenges, Mazda used Oracle VM for SPARC to virtualize and consolidate its middleware and applications on 25 servers onto three SPARC T4 servers to support its production environment, application development and disaster recovery.

Since both the old and the new servers were running Oracle Solaris, the migration to the new SPARC T4 servers took only two days to complete.

Using Oracle Solaris Containers, Mazda is running legacy applications in virtual machines, which allows them to run a mix of applications and take advantage of the latest SPARC T4 servers.

With SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris, Mazda has achieved:

• 50 percent faster PDM tool response time at peak hours. With as many as 3,500 users, the PDM tool supports 1 million transactions during peak hours at the beginning and end of each day(1).
• 40 percent reduction in monthly operational costs
• 75 percent lower monthly server power consumption
• 90 percent reduction in its data center footprint. Mazda reduced its MDI system from 12 racks to one.

Additionally, by consolidating onto SPARC T4 servers, Mazda's MDI system has the performance and flexibility to handle new business requirements and accommodate future growth.

Mazda purchased its SPARC T4 servers in July 2012.