6 Reasons Global Manufacturers Choose Cloud File Storage

May 12, 2021 | Anne Blanchard 6 Reasons Global Manufacturers Choose Cloud File Storage

The manufacturing industry has been one of our most reliable sources of both new and ongoing customers at Nasuni. Yes, file data is growing in size, volume, and complexity across all industries, but the potential problems stemming from this growth can be especially painful for large global manufacturers. Legacy storage devices can’t scale quickly or cost-effectively enough. Delays in file transfers between design sites and manufacturing facilities slow productivity time to market. Downtime at critical sites – whether the result of an outage or a ransomware attack – can lead to millions of dollars in losses.

Here are six ways Nasuni is helping global manufacturers drive efficiency and productivity by transforming their file infrastructure.

  1. Cost-effective capacity at all sites

The global watch brand Movado has 1,300 employees spread across 30 countries. Prior to Nasuni, giant Adobe Illustrator files were straining the firm’s infrastructure. Today, Movado no longer has to worry about any of its global locations running out of capacity, yet the firm is spending 50% less on primary storage. And since Nasuni has pushed scale to the cloud, decoupling storage growth from local hardware, Movado has been able to save costs and move to 100% flash storage on-prem, giving the manufacturer much better performance in its production environment.

  1. Global multi-site consolidation

Data storage manufacturing giant Western Digital used Nasuni to consolidate file infrastructure across three different billion-dollar companies, bringing 40 major sites and 100 additional remote and branch locations under a single cloud platform. Nasuni also allowed Western Digital to turn off 100 different storage devices from 7 different OEMs and helped the company shrink its data center footprint. Now, instead of a complex and difficult-to-manage mix of hardware silos, Western Digital and over 10,000 engineers rely on a global file system in the cloud.

  1. Recoveries in minutes, not days

We write often in this space about the value of moving away from backup – even modern cloud backup. Companies eliminate many costs, automate data protection, and accelerate and simplify recoveries. Plus, Nasuni ensures they can do this at scale, across dozens or hundreds of locations. In manufacturing, the impact of Nasuni’s built-in backup is especially strong. Nasuni ensures that companies can protect files and restore them quickly across dozens or even hundreds of locations. For today’s modern manufacturing environments, spread out across multiple continents, this means less project risk, and protection from potentially thousands of dollars of downtime due to a server or site outage.

For example, Movado dropped its RPO from 24 hours to one hour and reduced its RTO from days to minutes.

At specialty manufacturer AIXTRON, remote locations in Asia were backing up files to digital disk, then pushing these backups to Germany on the weekends, where they’d be stored on tapes. Nasuni gives the company a single, automatic, backup-less file data protection solution at all of its sites – even remote locations.

These fast recoveries extend to single- and multi-site ransomware attacks as well. “One of our suppliers was attacked, and they had up to 10 weeks of recovery time,” says AIXTRON CIO Olaf Rupprecht. “When they told me about this, I said, ‘I have Nasuni, so I don’t have that problem anymore.’”

  1. Accelerated Teamcenter design flows

Like many global manufacturers, AIXTRON relies on the Siemens Teamcenter File Management System (FMS). Teamcenter was designed to help companies manage large, complex files. It’s a fantastic product. But it wasn’t built for fast multi-site file sharing and collaboration. Previously, an AIXTRON system engineer in the U.S. had to wait three or four hours just to open a 3D model stored in Germany.

Then AIXTRON modernized with Nasuni. “We now have the performance to two-and-a-half minutes worldwide,” Rupprecht says. “In other words, a given model is available in roughly the same timeframe, but it’s available everywhere – not just in one location. If you compare loading time with Nasuni technology and without Nasuni technology,” he explains, “this is a performance increase of a factor of 5 to 10.”

  1. Follow-the-sun collaboration

With the acceleration of Teamcenter file sharing, AIXTRON has been able to move to a follow-the-sun model of collaboration in which productivity never stops. Work performed during the day in Asia is passed off to teams in Germany, and vice versa, as one workday ends and another begins.

Similarly, Movado customized its Nasuni deployment to optimize collaboration across time zones and ensure creative teams have access to the most recent versions of files. “We make it so the data pre-loads down to each office’s local appliance, so when they get to work in the morning, they’re not wasting the first hour or two of the day waiting for the most recent version of a file,” explains Director of Server and Client Solutions Ken Borthwick. “With Nasuni, the data is waiting for them and they can work at local speeds immediately instead of having to wait for transfers to finish. That has really improved productivity.”

At Western Digital, Nasuni reduced file transfer times between the U.S. and Japan from 12 to 18 hours to a matter of minutes. Large manufacturing data sets move quickly between sites in Bangalore and California thanks to high-speed synchronization, dedupe, and compression. The company’s IT leaders call the impact “life changing” for engineers, as they no longer have to babysit file transfers, sit through long copy times, or start over when the transfer fails.

  1. Agility and strategic responsiveness

One of the added advantages of moving away from traditional, hardware-based file infrastructure to Nasuni’s flexible, cloud-native global file system is that it allows companies to respond faster to new opportunities. Thanks in part to Nasuni, AIXTRON was able to establish and bring online a new factory in a new country in less than three months. No, we didn’t pick the building or supply the manufacturing equipment, but Nasuni did make it easy to equip local users with the same file storage, high-performance access, and complete data protection as the rest of the company. All it requires is a lightweight Nasuni Edge Appliance and an Internet connection. In very little time, that new location became part of the company’s global file system.

Nasuni & the Global Collaborative Engineering Problem

Finally, switching to Nasuni cloud file storage makes it easier to manage your global file infrastructure. As Western Digital’s IT leadership notes, it’s simpler to take care of one global file system than 150 NAS devices from 7 OEMs spread across 40 different global locations. Rupprecht seconds this point, highlighting Nasuni as a global solution for an increasingly global industry. “We are seeing more and more internationalization in the manufacturing industry in the last ten years, and it will continue to grow,” adds AIXTRON’s Rupprecht. “Nasuni is the solution to the global collaborative engineering problem.”

To learn how Nasuni can help your manufacturing organizationdrive efficiency and productivity, visit our virtual booth and attend our TechTalk at Manufacturing.xO May 24th-27th.

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