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Home >> Success Stories >> Ecological Fibers, Inc. Success Stories
FlashDisk Enables Company to Consolidate Business Operations The Organization - www.ecofibers.com Since its founding in 1972, Ecological Fibers, Inc., based in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, has been providing the book binding industry with high-quality paper products under the Rainbow brand name. Some of the items in the product line include coated and uncoated covering materials, book cloth, flocked covers, and a full selection of bindery construction materials. In 1979, Ecological Fibers acquired Narragansett Coated Paper Corporation, a 100-year old, Rhode Island-based producer of coated and printed materials for the decorative packaging industry. In the early 1990s, the two companies worked together to become the world's leading manufacturer of 100 percent solvent-free, water-based Kraft and Latex materials for book and packaging applications. In January 2001, the two companies merged, retaining the Ecological Fibers name.
FlashDisk Customer Profile as Told By Ecological Fibers, Inc. "The merger of Ecological Fibers, the sales and converting company, with Narragansett Coated Paper, the manufacturing company, meant that all orders would be processed at one location. In mid 2000, we decided to upgrade our network storage, a Hewlett-Packard LH3 with internal RAID storage, in anticipation of the volume of orders. This server runs our SCO Unix-based Solution8 integrated business package - everything from order processing to inventory. While our SCO Unix server was fast on processing, we were getting tight on disk space and adding drives to an older server didn't make sense. Justifying a storage subsystem to provide more room and better data protection for our integrated business applications meant a better return for our money. Also, it would be nice if we could improve the processing performance over what we had. We bought a mid-range, 550-MHz Hewlett-Packard LH6000 server to replace our 350-MHz server. For the RAID storage subsystem, we selected a Winchester Systems' FlashDisk, which works with any open systems server. To this end, if we decide to move to Linux, we can easily attach FlashDisk to a Linux server. FlashDisk also provides a lot of built-in redundancy, such as hot-swappable power supplies, fans, and disk drives. Why an external RAID storage subsystem? After all, I had experience only with servers with internal RAID storage. I never thought about an external RAID storage subsystem until I read an ad about how FlashDisk made a Honeywell Consumer Product Group's Oracle application run faster. Oracle applications can tax network resources. So if Honeywell benefited from FlashDisk, then I knew this storage subsystem was worth looking at. An external storage subsystem provided us with two advantages: the benefits of RAID level 5 data protection with a hot spare, and the ability to add drives to the existing system. Once I got FlashDisk attached to the new server, I conducted several tests to see what the performance improvements were over our previous system. I wrote a simple program to count to a million. The new system took three seconds; the old system, four seconds. To really test the difference in speed between the two storage systems, I did a test reading everything - including headers and detail-on 461,000 invoice records. FlashDisk took two minutes; our old system took four minutes. I figured that the new server contributed about 25 percent to the increase in speed, and the FlashDisk contributed to the rest of the speed. Because FlashDisk lets jobs finish faster than before, employees don't experience any delays in accessing data any time via the LAN. With the old system, I had to wait to the end of the business day to run one of my utilities that scanned an entire file. A couple of times when I ran the utility, I had employees calling me to ask why the server was so slow. Now, with FlashDisk, I can run the utility whenever I want. I don't get any calls. When I installed FlashDisk, I set up a shared drive through Unix that makes it possible for all employees to save their files on the server and print through the server. Whenever anyone prints to a Windows printer, the request passes through the new server. The printing is twice as fast as before. FlashDisk has even made our backups run faster. Our transfer rate with the old server was 68 Mbytes per minute. The transfer rate now, using the FlashDisk and 4-mm tapes cartridges on a HP DAT device, has just about doubled to 128 Mbytes per minute. My network uninterruptible power supplies now contribute to the new system's redundancy. An American Power Conversion (APC) SmartUPS 1000 communicates with the Unix server and does a proper Unix shutdown. If there is a power failure, it warns everyone that they need to log off the network. Since FlashDisk has dual power supplies, I have plugged one of the FlashDisk power supplies into the SmartUPS 1000 and the other one into the APC Symmetra, which is integrated to the company's power-panel I was impressed with FlashDisk from the minute I lifted it out of the box. This device's enclosure is metal, not plastic. This type of construction means that FlashDisk can withstand being moved. The FlashDisk's shipping carton shows that Winchester Systems makes sure its devices don't get damaged in transit. . Overall, I'd say that the FlashDisk is the everyman's RAID storage subsystem. It's at a price point which medium-sized companies, such as mine, can afford."
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