Xyratex
Presenting Server Design
What sort of business uses animation software more commonly used in television and the movies alongside its industrial design tools? Answer – one who counts some of the leading television and film graphics companies among its client list.
Xyratex was formed in 1994 as a management buyout from IBM. It is a global company but the mechanical design R&D group is based in the south of England. The Networked Storage Systems division of Xyratex builds large-scale data storage systems that are supplied as sub-systems to specialist suppliers that cover a wide variety of industries including ISP’s, medical imaging, finance and defence markets – and to the companies which develop high tech tools for media creation and editing. One of Xyratex’s main media customers is Autodesk, so it is appropriate that its design tools of choice also come from Autodesk.
Mark Scicluna is the mechanical design manager for the NSS division at Xyratex, but when he joined the company as a Product Designer in 1996 he arrived with a slightly unusual background. He was an engineer by training and trade – and an AutoCAD user from his previous work in the consumer products and ship-building industries – but in his spare time he had a fascination for 3D animation. He was one of the earliest users of a product then called 3D Studio, which is now part of the Autodesk media stable under the name 3ds Max.
When Mark arrived at Xyratex the company’s IBM heritage had left it with a design tool, which was expensive to maintain and really far more than it needed at that moment in its history. The Storage Systems Division, as it was then known, was effectively a start-up operation with two mechanical designers. As part of his brief to streamline the mechanical design process he moved to 2D AutoCAD, which he admits was used as “just an electronic drawing board”, but which gave them immense productivity gains without the overheads typical of high-end 3D CAD systems of the time.
While AutoCAD met their requirements, there was pressure from outside the design office to move to a new platform. “Every customer we dealt with began to ask for 3D models of the products,” Mark reported. Sometimes this request was to help integrate Xyratex storage solutions into larger installations, sometimes it was just to get a good idea of what a finished sub-system would look like. But the pressure was irresistible.
In 2003 the decision was taken to migrate to Autodesk Inventor, then in version 8, and the mechanical design team, which now numbers 15 people, has been 100% Inventor since then, being kept up to date with new releases and additional functionality by its VAR, Micro Concepts.
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