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Home >> Success Stories >> Wiremold Success Stories
With FlashDisk, Design Engineers Don't Wait for Manufacturer's 3-D Solid-Modeling CAD/CAM Files Organization Profile - www.wiremold.com Founded in 1916 in West Hartford, Connecticut, The Wiremold Company manufactures wire and cable management systems, power and data quality products, and communications connectivity systems. The raceway, a thin metal channel designed to secure and protect electric wiring, has formed the heart of The Wiremold Company's product line since 1990. Over the years though, engineers and contractors have come to view the raceway as a last resort-useful only when there was no other way to run wire. During the past five years, The Wiremold Company has embarked upon an aggressive program of quality improvement and product introduction. In 1999, The Wiremold Company was one of a few American companies to receive the Shaynoh Shingo Award for Excellence in Manufacturing. The Wiremold Company's new products incorporate end-to-end cabling systems for voice, data, and video. Meanwhile, The Wiremold Company has acquired 17 companies, including Walker Systems, and Sharpe Electronics. The Wiremold Company now lives up to its motto: "The only way to wire." FlashDisk Customer Profile As Told By Wiremold "The entire philosophy of our company is based on emulating the best of Japan's Toyota production system. Everything we do has to compress time from when customers first contact us to when they receive their invoice." Computing speed and networking performance have become major factors to us. We've spent millions of dollars upgrading all of our computer systems. At any given time, we have 100s of employees accessing our systems. If they have to wait to get the information, then we're not following our internal operating principles. That's what happened with our computer-aided design (CAD) system. Our computer-aided design (CAD) system allows mechanical design engineers to work with a three-dimensional, solid product image, and to make changes to that image in real time. It automatically updates the image so mechanical design engineers always work with the current version of the design. The efficiency of our CAD system doesn't depend on the number of mechanical design engineers it supports, but how well it can handle their files. Some of our CAD files can be as small as 200k to 300k or as large as 48 MB. Since frequent changes are made to these files, our CAD system's storage must be able to handle the retrieving and storing of large bursts of image data with split second turnaround. Several years ago, we set up two identical CAD systems - one in Connecticut and one in West Virginia. Both sites run a mix of midrange (SolidEdge) and the high-end (Unigraphics) CAD/CAM software on Intergraph IS615 Windows NT servers with DEC StorageWorks RAID storage systems. Each server connected to a LAN at its respective location. As time went on, the DEC StorageWorks was taking too long to deliver files to desktops. The system's reliability was questionable. We couldn't afford to have 50 mechanical engineers sitting around doing nothing. We aren't in the business of fixing computer systems. We set out to replace the old RAID storage system. We wanted a new RAID storage system that offered good price performance and flawless reliability. After reviewing a number of vendors' systems, we selected Winchester Systems' FlashDisk OpenRAID storage array. We installed one FlashDisk on the Intergraph at the West Virginia location. The performance seems to be 100 percent faster than what we had before. Our mechanical design engineers noticed the difference in performance from the first day. A few months later, we replaced the Intergraph in our main Connecticut facility with a new, dual-processor Hewlett-Packard LH3000 server with 2 GB of RAM. We also replaced the StorageWorks with a FlashDisk. The two new systems together provide excellent performance, and have garnered their share of favorable comments from users. As I was setting up the new system, I had to go back and repeat how long it took to do a NTFS format for the Windows NT file system. Usually with other systems, I'd have to wait up to 30 minutes or longer. With the FlashDisk, the procedure took about 2.5 minutes for a 12-GB file. It was so fast that I thought something had gone wrong. I even timed the procedure twice. I opted for FlashDisks with redundant controllers as an insurance policy to guard against single points of failure. To date, I haven't had any reliability problems with the FlashDisks. They've been up since the day we installed them. We literally ignore them for weeks and months on end."
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