1. North American
Interconnect
Case Study
North American Interconnect
Since 1993, North American Interconnect (NAI) has been a global leader in
the manufacturing of wire and cable assemblies. Its world-class integrated
supply chain and operations management, combined with a global manu-
facturing footprint in low-cost regions, provides customers with a unique
solution for all of their cable-assembly and wire-harness requirements.
NAI manufactures assemblies across diverse markets, including the
telecom, industrial, medical and aerospace industries. Its unique ability to
service both high-mix/low-volume and low-mix/high-volume programs
while complying with complex regulatory requirements enables the com-
pany to support every customer’s unique business needs.
The company relies heavily on Infor’s Visual Enterprise for MRP, ERP and
CRM. This tool handles materials coordination, manufacturing scheduling
and financial planning across the headquarters office as well as assembly
facilities across China and Mexico. The system runs on a mix of older-gen-
eration HP585 servers with VMware ESXi 4 and is connected to a NetApp
storage network that replicates data between the company colocation site
in Tempe, Arizona, and the company headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Case Study
“As we were running our tests,
Fusion-io kept asking us to
change the settings on Iometer
to smaller block sizes, among
other things. The result was still
definitively in favor of Virident.
Finally, we just stopped as the
tests had proven themselves to
our team.”
– Les WIllis, Director of IT

2. As described by Les Willis, director of IT, the system is“very chatty” be-
tween the hosts and the storage arrays, with application data as well as
TCP/IP traffic adding to the overall latency. As a result, the user experience
was sub-optimal, and weekly report processing for ERP took five to six
hours for China operations and up to 14 hours for the U.S. office. The daily
MRP process for the Mexico operations was taking as much as seven hours
to complete.
Furthermore, CPU resources were reaching high levels, and an IO bottle-
neck with the network storage was identified as the main reason for
lengthy report-generation times. To address the issue, Les began a search
for PCIe Flash, as an upgrade to fibre channel and larger SAN was seen as
too expensive, and the architecture, simplicity and price/performance of
PCIe looked most attractive for addressing the IO bottleneck.
NAI looked at Violin Memory, Fusion-io and Virident Systems. As Violin
was not prepared to offer demo cards for a bake-off, Les focused on Fusion-
io and Virident Systems. Fusion-io provided its latest product ioDrive2 Duo
at 1.6TB, Virident supplied a single-platter FlashMAX II 550GB drive. (Note,
the 550GB FlashMAX II is not Virident’s top performance device, as it is
only a single-processor, single-platter drive).
Using Iometer, an industry-standard benchmarking tool, Pete Pickhart,
computer operations manager for NAI, put both products through their
paces. The results were clear from the start. In nearly every category, the
Virident product out-performed Fusion-io. Most importantly, Virident’s IOs
per second handily beat out Fusion-io’s, meaning report generation times
would be significantly reduced. Highlighted below are NAI’s Iometer
report results for IOs per second:
“After helping NAI with this
mission-critical application, our
next step is to provide FlashMAX
Connect software to augment
the current high-availability
replication between NAI’s VMware
servers.”
– Tom Hobgood, Area Sales
Director
© 2012 HGST, a Western Digital company, 3403 Yerba Buena Road, San Jose, CA 95135 USA, Produced in the United States 9/11, rev. 5/12. All rights reserved.
HGST trademarks are intended and authorized for use only in countries and jurisdictions in which HGST has obtained the rights to use,
market and advertise the brand. Contact HGST for additional information. HGST shall not be liable to third parties for unauthorized use of this document or unauthorized use of its
trademarks.
References in this publication to HGST’s products, programs, or services do not imply that HGST intends to make these available in all countries in which it operates.
Product specifications provided are sample specifications and do not constitute a warranty. Information is true as of the date of publication and is subject to change. Actual specifica-
tions for unique part numbers may vary.
Please visit the Support section of our website, www.hgst.com/support, for additional information on product specifications. Photographs may show design models.
DSUC109011EN-01
Case Study
Fusion-io ioDrive Duo Virident Systems FlashMAX II

3. “MicroAge partners with
Virident | HGST to deliver
high-performance Server-
Side Flash Solutions. We
look forward to applying this
innovative technology with other
customers as we use our unique
consultative approach to address
real business problems.”
– Dan Archer, Company
© 2012 HGST, a Western Digital company, 3403 Yerba Buena Road, San Jose, CA 95135 USA, Produced in the United States 9/11, rev. 5/12. All rights reserved.
HGST trademarks are intended and authorized for use only in countries and jurisdictions in which HGST has obtained the rights to use,
market and advertise the brand. Contact HGST for additional information. HGST shall not be liable to third parties for unauthorized use of this document or unauthorized use of its
trademarks.
References in this publication to HGST’s products, programs, or services do not imply that HGST intends to make these available in all countries in which it operates.
Product specifications provided are sample specifications and do not constitute a warranty. Information is true as of the date of publication and is subject to change. Actual specifica-
tions for unique part numbers may vary.
Please visit the Support section of our website, www.hgst.com/support, for additional information on product specifications. Photographs may show design models.
DSUC109011EN-01
Case Study
Based on the performance benchmarking, it was clear to Les, Pete and the
IT team that Virident had the winning technology. They decided to‘double
down’with Virident and purchase the even higher-performance FlashMAX
II dual platter 1.1TB product.
The transaction was executed by Virident | HGST business partner Micro-
Age. The MicroAge team assured that the right hardware was delivered
and assisted with the deployment.
Next up, NAI will install the new Virident FlashMAX II into production
and begin comparing report generation times. The company also plans to
upgrade Infor Visual Enterprise from 6.5.3 to 7.1.1 as well as to deploy new
HP 385 Servers with ESXi 5. Overall, the expectation is that reports will
run at least twice as fast and that the user experience will be significantly
enhanced.
About MicroAge
MicroAge is a well-known name and a respected IT industry pioneer with
a heritage of industry innovation spanning five decades. A lot of compa-
nies sell computers and servers. But only MicroAge has an experienced
team of solutions consultants who work with clients to understand their
specific problem and goals.