Overview
A data foundation built for manufacturing quality
A leading silicon carbide substrate manufacturer operates multiple production sites and supplies automotive-grade materials. Each crystal-growth, substrate, and epitaxy process produces inspection images and measurement files that may need to be retained for more than 15 years.
Challenge
Inspection growth had outpaced line-side storage
Site-level NAS systems formed separate data islands. Large-image access was inconsistent, manual folder searches could take hours or days, and offline disk archiving made older records difficult to govern or restore. At long retention horizons, the projected estate reached tens of petabytes and tens of billions of files.
- More than 15 years of automotive-quality records had to remain provable and recoverable.
- Independent NAS islands prevented consistent cross-site search and capacity planning.
- Manual offline archiving separated old files from their production context.
Solution
One governed platform for the complete data lifecycle
IDM Agents collect inspection data from production equipment and automatically extract tags such as material ID, process step, timestamp, and equipment. Distributed object storage provides a shared cross-site namespace, while lifecycle policies archive cold files to tape and keep searchable metadata online. S3, CIFS, NFS, and FTP interfaces connect MES, YMS, and defect-analysis applications.
Automated equipment-side collection preserves process context as searchable metadata.
A distributed namespace supports multi-site access and 100-billion-file-scale retrieval.
Policy-based tape archiving keeps cold-data metadata online for precise restoration.
Results
Measurable value at production scale
Quality teams can locate a specified inspection record in seconds at 100-billion-file scale, then batch download or restore the selected evidence. Traceability moves from days to minutes or seconds, operating efficiency improves, and long-term retention becomes policy-driven rather than manual.
- Specified quality data can be retrieved within seconds at 100-billion-file scale.
- Batch-download workflows are more than 10 times faster in representative operations.
- The documented architecture reduces total cost of ownership by approximately 65%.
Customer identity and selected implementation details have been anonymized to protect confidentiality. No source diagrams or architecture images are reproduced in this article.
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