Manufacturing companies in industries like consumer goods, aerospace, automotive, defense, technology, machinery, and virtually any company that makes complex products, rely on CAD/CAM and PLM solutions. While extremely powerful, these applications rely on the sharing and transmission of very large files, solid models, simulations, project files and other data that can be hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In today's environment, development, design and manufacturing is no longer a local endeavor. Design and manufacturing are likely to be done in sites separated by thousands, or even ten thousand miles. The latency to remote sites at those distances can easily be in the hundreds of milliseconds, and if satellite links are in use, the latency can be close to a full second (750 to 1,000 ms). That extremely high latency, combined with typically low bandwidth and very expensive WAN links, results in terrible throughput. There has not been a good solution to this problem until now.
Accelerate product development cycles
With Riverbed WDS solutions, employees can have LAN-like access to key design documents, enabling manufacturers to drastically cut development cycles. Instead of waiting for files to be mailed to a remote location, or even waiting for a 12-hour FTP process to complete, users can get immediate access to files, servers, and applications that are halfway around the world. This way, users can also be sure they are using the most recent version of a design file, and avoid and potential versioning problems that occur when files are sent back and forth with long time delays.
Cut development costs
Using Riverbed, manufacturing firms can cut development costs by eliminating unnecessary IT infrastructure. While today it is typical to have local file servers in each office, this is in fact a complexity that can now be eliminated. Instead of requiring local copies of design files to be replicated every night to all other design offices (an administrative, security, and compliance headache that could lead to data consistency problems), design and manufacturing shops can now effectively use a centralized server for all data. Users anywhere can access data with LAN-like performance over the WAN, eliminating additional server and software capital expenditures and bypassing many IT support issues, while avoiding bandwidth upgrades or even cutting bandwidth costs significantly.
A high-tech manufacturer eliminates 90% of servers
A designer of antennae systems depends on its product lifecycle management (PLM) system to ensure that designers in more than a dozen offices can collaborate on the creation of new products. The size of design files, however, required 3 servers to be deployed in each office in order for the PLM system to work correctly. In addition to the additional capital expenditures, the company estimated that they would have to hire an additional IT staff member in order to maintain the system, including software upgrades, replication of the servers, and data backup. Instead, the organization decided to deploy a Riverbed Steelhead appliance in each of the remote offices. Doing so enabled the firm to see LAN-like performance for accessing centralized data. The firm no longer needed servers for the PLM system in remote offices, and designers could collaborate easily among offices.
