Nissan UK's Sunderland plant has won production of the Micra thanks
to savings resulting from the installation of a data storage
system.
Antony AdsheadThe Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9960 subsystem installed
in Nissan's S/390-based platform has enabled significant savings
through increased efficiencies. The 9960 is eight times faster than
its predecessor.
Neil Melville, manager of Nissan's European datacentre, said,
"Round-the-clock processing enables an increase in the data
turnover.
"That increases the efficiency of the entire plant - including
the turnaround time for the manufacturing of each car."
Liam Clifton, account manager for Hitachi, said, "Acquisition
and maintenance costs will be paid back in 18 months or less. The
high speed uptime of 100% and the ability of Nissan to upgrade
without bringing the system down are the major reasons for
this."
Money saved by more efficient data storage outweighed the
detrimental effects of the strong pound and won Micra production
away from the company's French plant.
"The Sunderland plant is the most efficient car plant in Europe
and the Lightning 9960 will clearly contribute to that efficiency,"
Melville said.
The previous EMC cluster system had to be shut down regularly
for maintenance. A dramatic growth in sales had brought about a
demand for increased storage capacity to house manufacturing as
well as dealer and ordering information.
The mission-critical all-Europe data had to be ported from the
existing EMC cluster to a completely new system. "The
implementation was totally painless," Melville said.
"Engineers from Nissan and Hitachi Data Systems worked closely
together on the project. The combination of good planning and team
work enabled the entire project to be completed in six to eight
weeks - including the planning stages," Melville added.
Batch processing times for end-of-day manufacturing data have
been reduced and all plants and sales forces now have
round-the-clock access to the 37 terabytes of data held at
Sunderland.
antony.adshead@rbi.co.uk