Lakeland Dairies' Business Flows with Fluid Data
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DAIRY PROCESSING INDUSTRY CASE STUDY 1 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, “Because Fluid Data management procurement, marketing, financial services, and of course a forward-thinking IT dynamically adapts to our virtual department to take care of all critical business data. environment, we can safely say Lakeland recently began a radical ‘technology refresh’ which would centralise that day-to-day management time upwards of 98 percent of its IT facilities around the primary, headquarters-based its has been reduced by 80 per cent.” main data centre in Killeshandra, County Cavan. A proprietary wide area network links the data centre to other Lakeland sites in Killeshandra, Bailieborough, Monaghan, TURLOUGH FARRELLY Belfast and Bromley, England. 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 RESULTS explained: “Storage was a key consideration at the centre of our plans for the technology refresh. Our data includes interactions with our producers – payments, » Replaced end-of-life attached storage hardware with efficient SAN 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 » Virtualised a time-intensive, disparate physical server environment 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.” » 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 interconnects » Slashed day-to-day storage system 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 management time by 80 per cent offer the flexibility Lakeland desired to maintain optimal business efficiency. » 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 OPERATING SYSTEMS demanding in terms of day-to-day management, and manual interventions were » Microsoft® Windows® cumbersome and time-consuming.” APPLICATIONS Farrelly and his team decided to look for a virtualised storage solution that would complement a virtualised server environment, dramatically improve visibility and » Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL availability during data recovery and remove the burden of manual data management. 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 2 importance of having a rapid, efficient Storage Center storage area networks and secure DR infrastructure. (SANs) with Fluid Data technology. The second system, located at a factory “We needed a storage solution that site in Bailieborough, 34 miles from the would be powerful but flexible and easy primary site, is mainly used as a DR to manage,” said Farrelly. “Fluid Data fail-over location. Because Compellent storage from Compellent was one of doesn’t require identical configurations the few solutions that fit with our own at remote locations, Lakeland has wide area network infrastructure and ZERO-TOUCH MANAGEMENT reduced the cost of running the DR provided scalability that would lay the DELIVERS BUSINESS site by relying solely on SATA drives. INTELLIGENCE foundations for future technologies For additional savings, both systems including rich media and unified use iSCSI interconnects, saving the Enterprise Manager empowers communications.” company approximately €30,000. Lakeland with real-time reporting, Each night, space-efficient snapshots streamlined management and SELECTING THE are replicated across IP lines, from the monitoring of both Compellent SANs. OPTIMAL SAN primary to the remote location. Because From this single pane of glass the Farrelly and his team were immediately Fluid Data architecture is so granular, operations team can manage both impressed by the Fluid Data technology, only the block-level changes need to be sent across the wire. This new robust the local and remote systems, as particularly its Automated Tiered Storage capabilities that dynamically recovery strategy is a vast improvement well as verify the remote replication classifies and migrates Lakeland’s data over physical transportation of tapes to processes, monitor storage capacity to the optimum tier of storage based secure off-site locations and a relief for and disk utilization in real time and on usage. the IT team, contributing to an estimated generate comprehensive storage savings of 60 per cent. For Lakeland, automating the data usage and performance reports. lifecycle has cut both the financial and management overheads by allowing THE ROAD AHEAD rarely accessed data to be stored on The transition to Microsoft Hyper-V is less expensive SATA disk arrays and off to the right start because Compellent only live data to reside on faster Fibre is the only SAN in the industry to Channel disks. integrate intelligent tiering with advanced virtualisation features like thin Automated Tiered Storage is particularly provisioning, snapshots and replication. cost-effective as Lakeland complies Lakeland has established an intelligent, with Ireland’s seven-year standard shared pool of storage resources that for financial data retention. The can now dynamically scale alongside company can now easily store data the demands of virtual machines. France: +33 (0)1 39 23 22 37 pertaining to long-standing contracts Italy: +39 346 878 5524 and accommodate more than 200,000 “That cost saving is definite, but so Germany: +49 211 5403 9606 different products on Lakeland’s records. is the amount of time we spend with UK: +44 1494-582041 storage administration,” explained Netherlands: +31 20 575 2644 Since implementing this built-in Farrelly. “Because Fluid Data intelligence, Lakeland has seen 75% of AsiaPac, Eastern Europe, management dynamically adapts to our its data progress down off tier 1 storage. Americas: +1 612 331 1850 virtual environment, we can safely say Farrelly, estimates that as the company that day-to-day management time has expands using mostly SATA drives, the been reduced by 80 per cent. We’re not [email protected] savings are substantial. constantly nursing those servers and can be proactive about our decisions.” © Copyright Compellent 2010 All rights reserved. NEW BEGINNINGS CSLD061610 Lakeland is now running two Compellent .