The high-tech manufacturing industry is driven by computer-aided design and engineering. In today's global economy, that means enormous files no longer reside on a local NAS or file server, but are often needed by teams working across an ocean or two. With files that can be tens to hundreds of megabytes, and in some cases gigabytes, transferring them over low-bandwidth lines can literally take hours.

Riverbed WDS solutions can increase the throughput of a large CAD file transfer by up to 100 times. That means that a file transfer that takes an hour today can be done in under a minute. That kind of performance can have a dramatic impact on productivity.

Another benefit for distributed design is that with much faster file transfer and access, it's often no longer necessary to maintain separate file vaults in each design center. Project leaders can store all relevant documents for a project in one site, and have engineers, project managers and designers work off of those files, no matter where they are. By eliminating redundant data storage, the risks of revision-control errors that cost your company huge amounts of money are dramatically reduced.