Lakeland Dairies Business Flows From Compellent

Lakeland Dairies, one of the largest dairy processing co-operatives in Ireland, has implemented a Fluid Data management solution from Compellent Technologies.

Adopting its Automated Tiered Storage technology and Microsoft’s Hyper-V server virtualisation platform, Lakeland has addressed its expanding storage requirements.

As a result, Lakeland has slashed day-to-day storage system management time by 80 per cent and automatically moved 75 per cent of its data to low-cost SATA drives. Lakeland estimates that since most future data growth at the company will reside on SATA drives, the ongoing savings will be substantial.

Lakeland, which turns almost one billion litres of milk into a wide range of quality food products and ingredients every year, was impressed by Compellent Fluid Data technology, particularly its Automated Tiered Storage capabilities which dynamically classifies and migrates its data to the optimum tier of storage based on usage. Automated tiering is fully integrated with other storage system features, including space-efficient snapshots, thin provisioning and replication.

For Lakeland, automating the data lifecycle has cut financial and management overheads by allowing rarely accessed data to be stored on cost-effective SATA disk drives while active data resides on faster Fibre Channel disks. Automated Tiered Storage has also helped Lakeland comply with Ireland’s seven-year standard for financial data retention requirements. The company stores inactive data pertaining to long-standing contracts and accommodates more than 200,000 different products on Lakeland’s records.

Turlough Farrelly, IT Manager for Lakeland Dairies, says: "Because Compellent’s 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. We’re not constantly nursing those servers and can be proactive about our decisions.”

Lakeland runs two storage systems with Compellent Fluid Data technology. The second system, located at a factory site in Bailieborough, 34 miles from its primary system in Killeshandra, is mainly used as a disaster recovery (DR) fail-over location. Because Compellent doesn’t require identical configurations at secondary locations, Lakeland has further reduced the cost of running the DR site by using solely SATA drives at the second site. Furthermore, both systems use iSCSI interconnects, saving the company an additional €30,000 in connectivity costs.

Andy Hardy, Director of International Sales for Compellent, comments: "As with any business of Lakeland’s size and complexity, data storage and management is of critical importance. Its 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. Compellent’s intelligent management of data movement has proven to deliver measurable cost and time savings to enterprises like Lakeland across industries.”

The whole integration solution was architected, designed and deployed by Origina, a Compellent partner, and an Irelands IT managed services and outsourcing company.