MTI HELPS FMC DRILL DOWN TO DATA

FMC Corporation, one of the world's leading producers of machinery for industry and agriculture, has selected MTI Technology's high-performance storage technology. MTI's solutions have enabled the company's Dunfermline-based Wellhead Equipment Division (WED) to store and extract the huge amount of data generated by its CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems.

The division, which engineers wellhead equipment for oil exploration companies in Europe and Africa, has become MTI's largest installed site in Scotland. When WED introduced CAD tools to design equipment for customers, the amount of data that needed to be stored increased dramatically. CAD tools generate multiple versions of memory-intensive files for every design project and the company needed rapid access to original plans, drawings and technical specifications.

"CAD is just one of several areas where our storage requirements have mushroomed, so we needed to upgrade our storage systems to increase capacity, performance and availability," said George Begg, IT manager for WED. "Fault resilience was essential, since downtime on the storage systems can stop hundreds of staff from using the IT system. If 300 people can't access the IT system for just an hour, that's 300 man-hours lost -- so reliability on the storage systems was a prerequisite."

WED evaluated storage solutions from many suppliers, but found MTI far more competitive. "It would have cost the same amount of money to maintain our old disk storage for another three years as it did to buy MTI's higher-performance storage technology," Begg added. "With MTI, we have more than quadrupled our storage capacity and achieved greatly increased data availability and security."

MTI's open systems technology has enabled WED to standardise its storage across multiple platforms. The company now uses MTI disk storage on DEC VAX, Unix and NT Servers. The company also chose MTI robotic tape libraries to provide a disaster-resilient back up solution.

According to Begg, MTI has maintained its position as WED's sole storage partner because of the professionalism of its customer service and support. It also recently bought a tailor-made disk solution to expand the storage capacity on its Unix systems, and it is also considering MTI RAID arrays for VAX and upgraded MTI robotic tape libraries.

MTI integrates distributed data management software, a hierarchy of modular storage systems and on-site services to Meet the mass storage needs of its customers. Headquartered in Anaheim, California, USA, the Company offers services and support from more than 40 offices in the United States and Europe.

For more information, see http://www.mti.com