Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Security and Compliance > Dell PowerScale: SmartLock Best Practices > Manufacturing: retaining reference and current design data
Most manufacturing design processes draw on current work, historic designs, and a library of reference data. Of these, historic designs—representing past and currently manufactured products that are the company’s current revenue stream—are frequently the company’s most critical asset. Historic designs are not only a reference for current development, they also constitute the company’s intellectual property portfolio. They are the foundations of patent creation and protection and liability defense.
Keeping all necessary data together is beneficial for applications and end-user access. Mixing it in the same cluster also reduces the overhead of purchasing, provisioning, and maintaining a separate storage solution.
Because SmartLock is integrated with OneFS and its SmartPools automated-tiering capability, you can store current work, historic designs, and reference data all on the same cluster. As shown in Figure 2, you can place each datatype on the most appropriate storage type to ensure proper performance and access. You can also have a different protection configuration for each datatype to balance the cost of storage with data criticality.