Medical Manufacturing FDA Compliance

A large medical manufacturing company was tackling an increasingly complex challenge.

Their facilities, spread across the globe, needed to comply with FDA regulations requiring video recording of their entire manufacturing processes. On paper, it sounded straightforward: record the assembly lines and retain the footage. In practice, however, the implementation was far from simple.

This client already had many cameras in place, varying in age, resolution, and storage needs. Adding to the complexity, they were preparing to upgrade to higher-resolution cameras in most of the facilities, though not all. Further, not all facilities had the same retention policies depending on the products being manufactured, and on top of all that, some facilities were slated for repurposing within a few years, meaning their requirements would change within the lifespan of the storage solution.

The client’s technology team wanted to simplify all of this. They needed a storage solution that could flex to meet the varying demands of each facility while remaining standardized enough for their team to manage seamlessly. The goal was a consistent approach that would work everywhere and be easy to support, whether it was storing a handful of video feeds or hundreds.

That’s where we came in.

We approached this by breaking the problem into two key parts: scalability and flexibility. First, we worked closely with their team to understand their current and future requirements, including a detailed breakdown of the current facilities and planned changes. We also factored in the uncertainty of the facilities that might be repurposed, ensuring the solution could adapt as needs changed.

Our recommendation was a modular storage architecture, built around a unified HPE storage platform that allowed them to scale up or down as needed. Each facility would deploy the same core MSA system, but with the flexibility to add compute resources for front-end feed processing or other features depending on specific demands. This standardization meant the IT team could learn one system, yet each site could have a setup tailored to fit its own requirements.

Another key consideration was the lifecycle of the storage systems. For facilities that might be repurposed, we ensured the solution was “portable”, allowing hardware to be reused or reconfigured if needed. This helped future-proof the investment, ensuring the company wouldn’t be locked into rigid systems as their manufacturing needs evolved. Even if a facility was closed entirely, that storage system could be deployed to a new facility or shelved as spare parts for the others.

Even though it’s been nearly a decade now, this deployment was so successful that we continue to be their go-to provider for ongoing support of this system as well as many of their other infrastructure projects.