Reference Corvaglia Mould AG

Corvaglia Mould AG – Innovative and fast: centrally managed CAM in a virtualised environment.

The corvaglia group has been passionate about bottle cap solutions for over two decades. The owner-operated company located in Eschlikon, west of Zurich with a production facility in Mexico has positioned itself as the an innovative supplier to the beverage industry, setting global standards for plastic caps. corvaglia is driven by innovation and a pioneering spirit and has a fully-integrated process chain that extends from the creation of cap solutions to fitting them onto the bottle. The company offers its customers everything from cap design and development, mould design and manufacturing, cap production, and providing technical support to clients when it comes to cap application for soft drinks, water and oils.

Project details.

Services

Virtualization

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Starting point.

The construction and production of single component caps for PET bottles requires highly-modern devices and processes. Therefore, corvaglia Mould AG introduced new company-wide ERP, CAD, CAM and PLM systems as the plastics processing industry requires high efficiency and also maximum flexibility from its IT. The CAD and CAM applications were however installed on separate computers, making use, maintenance and operation more complex.

The innovative company therefore wanted to introduce new IT structures that were not only affordable and high-performing, but also better supported business processes. During consultation with Bechtle, corvaglia discovered that it would be possible to implement CAD and CAM applications as virtual infrastructures for desktop PCs (VDI), thus moving away from CAD installations on individual desktops.

Project objectives.

corvaglia Mould AG wanted a real-time reaction for CAD and CAM applications. They were also looking for hardware whose lifespan would not be negatively influenced by the mixture of oil and air at production workstations. Moreover, the subject of data protection needed to be considered so as to reduce the danger of data loss. Due to components needing to be quickly replaced, the company also wanted to reduce costs by using existing IT resources.

Expensive workstations with complex special installations are particularly necessary in production areas. That’s why we were looking for a solution that reduced both the effort required for installations and hardware-related outages. Bechtle found exactly what we were looking for. We were very impressed that Bechtle always took into account our needs and concerns and were by our side the whole way through. Thanks to this solution, we are now able to be proactive again, instead of always just reacting.

Michel Vogt, IT Manager, Corvaglia Mould AG

Process.

Corvaglia were unsure if access and response times of performance-intensive CAD applications would be able to keep up with the demands of the company in a virtualised environment. The Bechtle experts therefore organised all necessary information and resources and corvaglia analysed their existing needs. With the help of rented infrastructure, Bechtle then created a proof of concept to demonstrate the feasibility of the project. This showed that, thanks to today’s technological standards, CAD and CAM response times are also able to meet the challenges presented by corvaglia even in a virtualised environment.

Solution.

For both the feasibility study and the implementation of the virtual environment at corvaglia Mould AG, Bechtle decided on a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) ProLiant-DL380-Gen9 server designed to reduce costs and IT infrastructure complexity and optimise virtualised environments.

The server was equipped with a powerful NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU and 10 GB Ethernet connection. In combination with the latest Intel E5-2600-v4 processors, the HPE ProLiant-DL380-Gen9 server accelerates workflows with additional power and reliability provided by the first Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) - HPE Persistent Memory.

The NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU gives corvaglia the best performance levels for its virtual workstations and CAM applications meaning that compute-intensive graphics applications can be used anywhere and on any device regardless of the end device’s actual power. Each workstation was equipped with maintenance-free Zero Clients that are perfect for production environments that are hostile to hardware thanks to their fanless design.

Business benefits.

All employees working in corvaglia Mould Ag’s production department now have access to the CAM and PLM systems used by the company. The hardware infrastructure can be easily swapped or extended while the firewall and other software can be quickly updated meaning the server structure is now perfectly equipped for the future.

Manual interventions by the IT departments are kept to a minimum thanks to the features and automatism built into the HPE server, reducing IT costs and taking the weight off the shoulders of the IT department. In addition, backups can be centrally created, boosting data security and optimally exploiting IT resources.