Movado

Movado unifies global design & manufacturing teams with Nasuni®

Movado

About Movado

In addition to its own Concord, Ebel, Movado, Olivia Burton, and MVMT timepieces, Swiss watchmaker Movado produces licensed products for Ferrari, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, and many other leading brands. Since its start in the Swiss village of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1881, Movado has been dedicated to three principles: excellence in design, craftsmanship, and technological innovation.

The challenge

Movado was stuck in a costly, inefficient software purchasing cycle.

All those beautiful watches and timepieces begin as design files, and in recent years, Movado has been challenged to store, protect, manage, and share these growing pools of unstructured data between global offices.

Movado was constantly purchasing more file storage. NAS hardware would be purchased with a five-year maintenance contract, and as the fifth year approached, the storage vendor would inform them that the cost to renew the service contract would be on par with buying an entirely new storage system.

How Nasuni helped Movado

With Nasuni Cloud File Services™ and Amazon cloud storage, Movado has the scalable, easy-to-manage file infrastructure it needs to support continued innovation.

The impact of Nasuni and AWS at Movado can be distilled into five key benefits.

1. Unlimited global storage capacity
UniFS® scales without limits inside Amazon cloud storage. Applications can write directly to cloud storage, acting just like traditional NAS-based file systems.

2. Speed
Nasuni Edge Appliances provide LAN-speed access to unstructured data, optimizing collaboration between different teams and locations.

3. Data recovery
UniFS® continuous file versioning system securely protects Movado’s files in AWS as they change. This provides improved RPOs and RTOs and eliminates the need for separate backup or DR.

4. Savings
The switch to Nasuni and Amazon has broken the cycle of NAS refresh and freed up valuable IT budget, while also improving file sharing speeds. 5. Support

Movado values the responsiveness and professionalism of Nasuni’s support team.

Nasuni reduces file sharing delays for Movado’s design & manufacturing teams.

Movado’s designers and suppliers work heavily with the Adobe Creative Suite, along with CAD, 3D files, SOLIDWORKS, and other data-intensive applications. Explains Ken Borthwick, Director of Server and Client Solutions at Movado, “In addition to standard file sharing, our biggest needs are on the design and manufacturing side. We needed to find a better way to get our designs from where they’re created in the U.S. and Europe to where the products are actually made, in Europe and Asia. We often had a lot of delays, especially with large images.”

Nasuni minimizes collaboration headaches.

The creative process only compounded these problems. Like many manufacturers, Movado goes back and forth with design ideas and minor and major changes to files are made all around the world. Movado’s creative and manufacturing teams struggled to find a way to share files that were both timely and secure. Borthwick explains, “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. 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.”

Nasuni’s centralized management eliminates shadow IT.

Unapproved file-sharing solutions and their related cost and security impact have been curtailed with Nasuni’s global file system. Details Borthwick, “We could see that shadow IT was becoming a problem. Without a corporate alternative, users gravitated to cloud-based file-sharing apps they were familiar with, like Dropbox and Box, without really considering data security. With Nasuni, they don’t have to go looking for those alternative, unmanaged solutions, and Nasuni’s management console gives us control over storage and file sharing across all our locations.”

Nasuni cuts Movado’s storage costs in half.

Movado was also experiencing a common problem that occurs when designers and creative teams wait too long for the files they need: they resort to their own “shadow IT” solutions, which lead to storage duplication, network strain, potential security risk, and more. Says Borthwick, “By moving our unstructured data to Nasuni and Amazon, we are spending about 50% less on primary storage. Plus, we’ve gone from a 10% spinning disk- 90% flash split to 100% flash, giving us much better performance for our production, virtualized server environment.”

Nasuni shrinks backup time and ensures reliable recovery.

Meanwhile, the IT group struggled to backup all those critical files. Roughly 50% of the company’s storage is unstructured data, and as these volumes grew, the time required to backup files to tape was growing longer. Borthwick explains, “The backup windows were getting bigger and bigger. It was taking a whole weekend to get a full backup, and backup failures were not uncommon. When the backups failed you were behind, and since we could only feasibly backup file data once a day, that meant we had a 24-hour recovery point, which isn’t ideal when your end users are making a lot of changes to design files.”

Nasuni gives us both the global collaboration and data protection we were looking for. Overall, it has greatly improved file sharing and made the whole process of managing unstructured data easier for Movado.

Kenneth Borthwick, Sr. Director of Infrastructure

The Nasuni difference

As part of a cloud-first strategy that also takes cost reduction into consideration, Movado has deployed Nasuni Cloud File Services and Amazon S3 public cloud object storage for its 7 locations across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The company now has scalable file storage, advanced data protection, simple storage administration, and cross-office collaboration. Says Borthwick, “We explored different options, but we wanted to break our reliance on hardware. Nasuni fits the key use cases we need to address, and they do it through a complete service delivery model that fits with our long-term vision.”

‘Nasuni’s “cache from cloud” architecture stores the gold copies of all Movado’s files and metadata in AWS while caching frequently used files in each location on virtual or physical Nasuni Edge Appliances. Because of this approach, unstructured data and metadata scale in the cloud, not on local hardware, and high-performance access to files.

With Nasuni Cloud File Services and Amazon cloud storage, Movado has a scalable global file infrastructure it needs to support its collaborative design and production teams; the RTOs and RPOs that its end users and their design files deserve; and a cloud-centric service model that liberates the company from legacy storage hardware and its associated costs and limitations.

Industry: Manufacturing

Cloud file storage: Nasuni

Object storage: AWS

Use cases: File server consolidation, ROBO file storage, cloud backup, multi-site file collaboration

Benefits: Unlimited file storage, cost savings, elimination of NAS refreshes and data migrations, improved productivity, RTO reduced from days to minutes, RPO improved from one day to one hour, “Shadow IT” replaced by single global file system managed centrally by IT