The problem
Most ITAD refurbishers have started shredding drive caddies along with the drives they pull from servers in the name of “efficiency”. For Laminar Networks, this meant that sourcing caddies for their next Ceph cluster build was either prohibitively expensive or just impossible.
The Solution
Laminar worked to design a 3D-Printable shim that could stand in place of Supermicro’s locking drive caddy. Their design also allowed them to make installation toolless, saving on screws at scale as well. Then they brought the design to us at Zenkai Manufacturing.
Hundreds of these parts needed to live in always-on servers constantly under load. We produced ~200 shims in the first run, fit them into Laminar’s servers, and saw how they fared at load inside the datacenter.
The first run of 200
The result
Further production is now underway, enabling Laminar to roll out over a Petabyte of new Ceph capacity for their customers without having to go through the nightmare that would’ve been attempting to source hundreds of decommissioned drive caddies for their servers.
This is the kind of work Zenkai Manufacturing is built for: you bring the design, and we manufacture it in the material and quantity the job needs. If you have a part that needs making, get in touch.