Lakeland Dairies' Business Flows with Fluid Data

DAIRY PROCESSING INDUSTRY CASE STUDY

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LAKELAND DAIRIES’ BUSINESS FLOWS WITH FLUID DATA STORAGE

Encompassing a ﬁfteen county catchment area in the northern half of Ireland, Lakeland Dairies is the second-largest dairy processing co-operative in the country. Each year, the organization turns almost one billion liters of milk into a wide range of quality food products and ingredients.

Lakeland is a sophisticated, automated production operation, split into distinct Food service, Food Ingredients and Agri-business divisions, as well as an additional US Food Ingredients business unit. As you would expect, the group can only operate efﬁciently thanks to an effective cast of support services, a customer relations team, procurement, marketing, ﬁnancial services, and of course a forward-thinking IT department to take care of all critical business data.

“Because Fluid Data management dynamically adapts to our virtual environment, we can safely say that day-to-day management time has been reduced by 80 per cent.”

Lakeland recently began a radical ‘technology refresh’ which would centralise upwards of 98 percent of its IT facilities around the primary, headquarters-based its main data centre in Killeshandra, County Cavan. A proprietary wide area network links the data centre to other Lakeland sites in Killeshandra, Bailieborough, Monaghan, Belfast and Bromley, England.

TURLOUGH FARRELLY

IT Manager

As IT Manager for Lakeland Dairies, Turlough Farrelly is responsible for heading the business’s IT operations and managing the entire infrastructure. A major part of this task includes the efﬁcient storage of all business process-related data. Farrelly explained: “Storage was a key consideration at the centre of our plans for the technology refresh. Our data includes interactions with our producers – payments, analysis and tests results – full ERP systems that run across all our production sites, payroll, HR systems, weighbridge systems.” Other small peripheral systems feed into the central ERP and ﬁnancial systems for the group. “As with any business of our size and complexity, data storage and management is of critical importance.”

RESULTS

» Replaced end-of-life attached storage hardware with efﬁcient SAN
» Virtualised a time-intensive, disparate

physical server environment
» Migrated 75% of its data onto lower-

tiered, inexpensive drives
» Reduced cost of DR by at least

TECHNOLOGY REFRESH

60 per cent
» Saved €30,000 by using iSCSI
The largest undertaking in Lakeland’s centralisation process was its move to a

virtualised server environment. Looking back, the business maintained 35 physical servers running multiple versions of Windows OS and a wide range of distinct applications. Storage came in the shape of direct-attach IBM devices, which did not offer the ﬂexibility Lakeland desired to maintain optimal business efﬁciency. interconnects
» Slashed day-to-day storage system

management time by 80 per cent
» Established solid foundation for future

growth and data expansion
Farrelly said: “Our storage requirements were expanding rapidly and obviously would continue to do so into the future. Our existing storage system was becoming very demanding in terms of day-to-day management, and manual interventions were cumbersome and time-consuming.”

OPERATING SYSTEMS

» Microsoft^®Windows^®

APPLICATIONS

Farrelly and his team decided to look for a virtualised storage solution that would complement a virtualised server environment, dramatically improve visibility and availability during data recovery and remove the burden of manual data management.
» Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL
Server, Microsoft Exchange, IBM Domino
The ﬁnal incentive for change was provided by two local incidents –extensive criminal damage to communication links and a chemical spill on site – which highlighted the

DAIRY PROCESSING INDUSTRY CASE STUDY

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importance of having a rapid, efficient and secure DR infrastructure.
Storage Center storage area networks (SANs) with Fluid Data technology. The second system, located at a factory site in Bailieborough, 34 miles from the primary site, is mainly used as a DR fail-over location. Because Compellent doesn’t require identical configurations at remote locations, Lakeland has reduced the cost of running the DR site by relying solely on SATA drives. For additional savings, both systems use iSCSI interconnects, saving the company approximately €30,000.
“We needed a storage solution that would be powerful but flexible and easy to manage,” said Farrelly. “Fluid Data storage from Compellent was one of the few solutions that fit with our own wide area network infrastructure and provided scalability that would lay the foundations for future technologies including rich media and unified communications.”

ZERO-TOUCH MANAGEMENT DELIVERS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Enterprise Manager empowers Lakeland with real-time reporting, streamlined management and

Each night, space-efﬁcient snapshots are replicated across IP lines, from the primary to the remote location. Because Fluid Data architecture is so granular,

SELECTING THE OPTIMAL SAN

monitoring of both Compellent SANs. From this single pane of glass the operations team can manage both the local and remote systems, as well as verify the remote replication processes, monitor storage capacity and disk utilization in real time and generate comprehensive storage usage and performance reports.

Farrelly and his team were immediately impressed by the Fluid Data technology, particularly its Automated Tiered Storage capabilities that dynamically classiﬁes and migrates Lakeland’s data to the optimum tier of storage based on usage. only the block-level changes need to be sent across the wire. This new robust recovery strategy is a vast improvement over physical transportation of tapes to secure off-site locations and a relief for the IT team, contributing to an estimated savings of 60 per cent.
For Lakeland, automating the data lifecycle has cut both the ﬁnancial and management overheads by allowing rarely accessed data to be stored on less expensive SATA disk arrays and only live data to reside on faster Fibre Channel disks.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The transition to Microsoft Hyper-V is off to the right start because Compellent is the only SAN in the industry to integrate intelligent tiering with advanced virtualisation features like thin provisioning, snapshots and replication. Lakeland has established an intelligent, shared pool of storage resources that can now dynamically scale alongside the demands of virtual machines.
Automated Tiered Storage is particularly cost-effective as Lakeland complies with Ireland’s seven-year standard for ﬁnancial data retention. The company can now easily store data pertaining to long-standing contracts and accommodate more than 200,000 different products on Lakeland’s records.
France: +33 (0)1 39 23 22 37 Italy: +39 346 878 5524
“That cost saving is deﬁnite, but so

is the amount of time we spend with storage administration,” explained Farrelly. “Because Fluid Data
Germany: +49 211 5403 9606 UK: +44 1494-582041
Since implementing this built-in
Netherlands: +31 20 575 2644

AsiaPac, Eastern Europe, Americas: +1 612 331 1850 intelligence, Lakeland has seen 75% of its data progress down off tier 1 storage. Farrelly, estimates that as the company expands using mostly SATA drives, the savings are substantial. management dynamically adapts to our virtual environment, we can safely say that day-to-day management time has been reduced by 80 per cent. We’re not constantly nursing those servers and can be proactive about our decisions.” [email protected]

NEW BEGINNINGS

CSLD061610

Lakeland is now running two Compellent