Westar Supports 20-Year Hardware Lifecycles on Files.com Without Owning a Server

Westar Display Technologies builds the equipment that tells manufacturers whether a display actually works. Since 1993, the company has designed optical and electrical test systems, LCD controllers, and video processors for customers in electronics, avionics, defense, and medical markets worldwide. Westar operates as part of Peraton, the national security technology company, which handles the site's administrative and legal work and leaves Westar's small team focused on building hardware.

That hardware creates a long obligation. Westar's products ship with firmware, configuration files, and supporting software, and they stay in service for 15 to 20 years. A customer who bought a test system a decade ago may need its software today, unchanged from the day it was published. A company that ships hardware that lives that long has to be able to deliver software for just as long.

The Files Email Refuses to Carry

The software itself was the problem. Firmware images, installers, and in-house applications travel as .msi files, .exe files, and zip archives with executables inside, which is exactly what corporate mail systems block.

“Our corporate email won't allow you to send .msi files, and certainly not .exe files or even zip files with exes in them.”

When email could not carry a file, delivery became improvised. An engineer found whatever channel a given recipient could accept: a consumer sharing tool for a one-off handoff, an email that might or might not go through, a new workaround per customer, per file. Those handoffs provided no standing, company-scoped place for proprietary files exchanged under NDA. Nor did they create a durable archive. A support archive for 20-year hardware has to stay reachable longer than any ad hoc channel survives.

A File Server With Nobody to Run One

The obvious fix, a self-hosted FTP server, was off the table twice over. Westar's people build and test display hardware; Peraton handles administration, not customer-facing file infrastructure, and nobody at the site could take on running a server as a job. And Westar's own IT would not put a customer-facing box on the production network. Anything customers could reach had to be isolated from the servers that run the business.

So the requirement was specific: an FTP server that customers never have to know is an FTP server, with access separated per customer company down to individual NDA folders, hosted somewhere other than Westar's network, and simple enough for one engineer to run alongside his actual job.

“When I first started looking, I was looking for just an FTP, some company that would put perhaps a graphical user interface on the front of an FTP site.”

Westar selected Files.com to be that server.

A Portal Where Each Customer Sees Only Its Own Files

Customers reach the portal through a support link on the Westar website. Behind it, Max McCune, the electronics and firmware engineer who runs the site, built the access model out of Files.com users and groups. Each customer contact gets an account assigned to a group representing their company. Group-level permissions mean a new contact inherits exactly their company's access. When proprietary information moves under NDA, it goes into a folder that only that customer can see.

Files are organized by product model, with deprecated versions archived alongside current ones so a customer can downgrade when a situation calls for it. Most customers work in the browser; the same accounts connect over SFTP or FTPS when a customer's systems prefer a protocol. The result is what McCune describes as "just an FTP server without having them needing to know anything about FTP."

Because Files.com hosts the whole thing, the portal meets the isolation requirement by construction. There is no path from the download site into Westar's production servers, because the download site does not run on Westar's network.

“People can't get to us directly, and that's what our IT people are worried about: they don't have backdoor access from this to get into our actual servers.”

Distribution That Outlives the Products

With the portal in production, Westar established a standing product-support channel for hundreds of customers, and the channel carries exactly the payloads email rejects.

• Installers, firmware, and executables reach customers through the portal. Nothing bounces off a mail filter, and nothing has to go out through an unmanaged consumer tool.
• A file published once stays downloadable for the 15-to-20-year life of the hardware. A customer returning years later for a file that never changed finds it where it always was.
• Adding the next customer is a user in a company group. The permission model applies itself, with no new access design per customer.

None of this added infrastructure. There is no server on Westar's network, no patching cycle, and no dedicated headcount spent on file transfer. One engineer administers the entire archive alongside his engineering work.

Twenty Years of Support, No Server Owned

Today, honoring a 20-year support obligation at Westar means keeping a folder published and a customer's group current. For the core archive, it no longer means finding a delivery path one recipient at a time and hoping the file will still have a home when the customer comes back. Files.com is the file server; Westar's engineers stay on the hardware.

“Since we're so small, we just need a non-local GUI-based file system, and that's exactly what it is.”

A manufacturer whose products outlive most software platforms keeps customers supplied for the life of the hardware, without owning a server or hiring anyone to run one.