Engineers get rapid-fire access to giant files in the cloud

August 31, 2015 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary K. Pratt.

At Milwaukee Tool, the long, long waits to open large CAD files were making international collaboration between engineers in the U.S. and China inefficient–and threatening the company’s goals for innovation, agility and speed. Eric Hanson, the company’s vice president of IT and business optimization, says engineers in China often had to wait multiple hours for the tool company’s design files, typically about 2GB each, to open.

Because of the lag, engineers in China saved files locally so they could be opened quickly. But that meant their changes weren’t visible to engineers in other locations, and vice versa, until files were later synced. Moreover, because engineers worked with local files, there was a chance that files might not have up-to-date information, which could lead to duplication of effort and incomplete product designs, Hanson says…

That scenario could, and occasionally did, create costly "scrap and rework" situations when product designs moved into production…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/2969324/cloud-computing/engineers-get-rapid-fire-access-to-giant-files-in-the-cloud.html