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.

The server would run an operation that pulls data from the plant floor in Canton and interfaces it with the SAP system located overseas. Given the far-flung IT operations, there was not much room for error. With that in mind, Scheidemantel's emphasis while server shopping was on uptime and redundancy for overall system reliability.

"We wanted this to be a lights-off system," Scheidemantel says. "We have one person for our IT infrastructure here ... and his main responsibility is the upkeep of the network in the U.S. If possible, we wanted this to have little to no impact on him."

Last year, Scheidemantel built a plant-floor data collection system that culls control information from programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and a variety of instrumentation. Using SAP AG's xMII technology, that information is analyzed and sent to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. This year, a warehouse management data collection application was put in place. It, too, relies on xMII to interface the data captured by a handheld scanner with SAP. Before this automated application was in place, everything was done manually.

The good news is that the xMII technology will optimize operations. The bad news is that it adds a new layer of complexity to the IT infrastructure. To mitigate risk, Scheidemantel invested in a Stratus Technologies server built specifically for complex manufacturing environments.

"We needed a system we could consider bulletproof so we didn't lose any data," Scheidemantel says. "In the research we did, Stratus came up as No. 1 in reliability."

Most manufacturers face a similar scenario. As they tap into more tools to help crunch numbers and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that tie back to the ERP system, the need for reliability becomes paramount. To that end, sophisticated software that lets companies dig deep into the factory floor needs hardware to run it that is just as sophisticated.