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Home >> Success Stories >> Universal Instruments Success Stories
FlashDisk Speeds Up Electronics Firm's Administrative Applications Organization Profile - www.uic.com Laptop PCs. Automotive Ignitions. Fluorescent Lights. If a product has a circuit board in it, there's a likelihood a system from Universal Instruments automatically soldered the components onto the board. Headquartered in Birmingham, New York, Universal Instruments supplies most of the electronics industry with systems for the manufacture of electronic circuit assemblies. To date, the company has installed more than 16,000 systems in 34 countries. Dover Corporation (NYSE:DOV), a $4 billion diversified manufacturer of industrial products, owns Universal Instruments, which started as a safety pin company in 1919. FlashDisk Customer Profile As Told By Universal Instruments "We had reached the point where the information technology department couldn't ensure the company's 1,400 employees with access to a reliable file and print server for administrative tasks, such as word processing. At any one time more than 700 employees would hit upon the DEC Alpha, a Windows NT-based RISC system purchased in 1995. I kept getting bombarded with telephone calls saying it took anywhere from 30 seconds to one minute to open a Microsoft Word file. Sometimes I'd get calls saying that PowerPoint documents took two to three minutes to open. We added RAID 5 StorageWorks disks to the DEC Alpha with the hope that the additional space could handle the volume of users. However, the space filled up almost overnight and the slow access to documents continued. Each day I had to look at the primary share on the server. Every week I was sending a message to employees to remove files they didn't need. Meanwhile, the numbers of employees had grown to the point where the DEC Alpha didn't have enough memory, storage, and horsepower. With a new fiscal year not far off, we didn't want to spend any money to make the DEC Alpha Y2K compatible or to upgrade the server so its performance could handle the volume of employees. At the beginning of year, I began searching for a replacement for the DEC Alpha. I evaluated several Dell servers with attached proprietary RAID storage, along with external RAID storage systems from IBM and Winchester Systems. I narrowed my search to IBM and Winchester Systems. Since cost was a big concern, we decided to go with Winchester Systems' FlashDisk OpenRAID storage system. We were impressed with what customers had to say about the FlashDisk's speed and reliability. We liked the idea of servers being able to share one external storage system. We also liked knowing that we could add more drives to each array in the storage system. We finally replaced the DEC Alpha with two Dell 2300 PowerEdges, and a rackmount FlashDisk. We also changed the way the server connected to the network. A 100-Mbit card in this Windows NT server allows it to connect to a Fast Ethernet network via a switched router. To speed up access to documents, we divided the FlashDisk storage space into two volumes to be shared between the two servers. The transition from the DEC Alpha to the Dell with a FlashDisk went smoothly. Employees couldn't help commenting on the speed difference between the old and new server. Rather than complaints, I got compliments. Everyone got split second access to all of their documents. I figured that the FlashDisk was operating two to three times faster than the DEC Alpha's StorageWorks. Even the chief information officer recognized that the FlashDisk was considerably faster than what we had before."
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