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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | The move toward centralized, plant-wide applications is ushering in a new era for hardware. Servers and storage for industrial environments are built to be reliable, flexible, and, most important, self-sufficient. |
The system must be bulletproof because there's not enough IT staff to maintain it. Have you heard those words before? If you're a manufacturer looking to update your server and storage systems to accommodate plant-wide applications, you very likely have. In fact, that's the premise upon which Greg Scheidemantel, plant manager at Sika Sarnafil Inc., had to choose the server that would run the company's warehouse management system. The Swiss-owned company relies on its Europe-based IT group to maintain the corporate SAP implementation. That centralized staff is supported by remote IT in other parts of the world, which includes one person at Scheidemantel's Canton, MA, industrial roofing plant. That one IT person, however, is responsible for supporting 250 employees across the United States. So, as Scheidemantel began building out the company's warehouse management system earlier this year, the worry was not so much the application, but the hardware underneath. [Click to continue] |