Cutting-edge hyperconverged infrastructure for a growing agribusiness

Challenge

Updating enterprise infrastructure for growth in a demanding industry

Aurivo is a global agribusiness with exciting consumer brands and diverse portfolio across dairy ingredients, consumer foods and sports nutrition, retail and lifestyle stores, animal nutrition and livestock marts.

Their consumer foods business comprises a range of well-known milk, butter and nutrition brands, such as Connacht Gold, Arrabawn, Organic For Us, Donegal Creameries and For Goodness Shakes; while Aurivo Dairy Ingredients produces enriched powdered milk and bulk butter that is exported to over 50 countries globally.

Aurivo Agribusiness combines a number of growing elements, including 34 Homeland stores and garden centres, along with its successful animal feed brand Nutrias. In addition, 4 livestock marts operate in the West of Ireland under the Aurivo brand.

ProCloud has worked with Aurivo for several years beginning in 2018, when Aurivo's legacy data centre infrastructure was holding back business operations and growth. Aurivo trusted ProCloud to replace the ageing infrastructure with a turnkey HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. The project also brought disaster recovery back in-house, replacing an expensive, outsourced solution. It was the beginning of a strong and lasting partnership.

Five years later, with a fast-growing business placing ever greater demands on IT, Aurivo was ready to upgrade again to take advantage of the latest HCI technology. As Aurivo's trusted IT partner, our ProCloud team was at hand to work on the next generation solution, collaborating with Aurivo’s Group Head of IT, David O'Sullivan and his team, to plan and execute a hardware refresh.

Aurivo was very happy with the SimpliVity platform which supports their many in-house systems effectively and easily. With a 30:1 ratio of virtual to physical storage, HCI delivers excellent efficiency and flexible storage. HPE’s RapidDR software provides a secure, reliable and cost-effective disaster recovery solution, so workloads can transfer between Aurivo's Sligo and Ballaghaderreen locations in the case of unforeseen events. Aurivo uses InfoSight and PRTG to monitor and manage all the infrastructure on one large status screen.

Solution

The latest generation of proven hyperconverged infrastructure

Aurivo's business has grown strongly over the last five years and is set to continue its success. Market-driven pricing in the commodity milk and dairy market means that Aurivo needs flexibility in its IT infrastructure, to respond to changing business demands. Recent strategic innovation projects in manufacturing (MES) and warehousing (WMS) also place higher demands on the power and speed of its IT storage and processing technology.

Aurivo relies on a wide range of data, from retail and financial to supply chain and telemetry, for decision-making and to optimise operational performance. The food sector in which Aurivo operates is a highly regulated industry: meeting the latest compliance and cyber security requirements, such as NIS2 efficiently, depends on advanced IT solutions. The updated hosting platform is designed to provide capacity and cutting-edge infrastructure for the next five years.

For the refresh, ProCloud deployed the latest generation of SimpliVity nodes and HPE GreenLake cloud. These continue to underpin all the HCI and DR functionality that Aurivo needs, with flexibility to expand to meet business requirements. The latest SimpliVity release provides more capacity, twice as much storage and faster solid-state disks, supporting 50% faster processing. We managed the upgrade process smoothly, with no unplanned downtime and minimal disruption to the business.

Results

Looking ahead to success over the next five years

For Aurivo, the HPE SimpliVity solution is key for the success of their business. ProCloud is uniquely experienced to deploy SimpliVity in the Irish market: our expertise and advice is highly valued by David O'Sullivan and his team. It's key to our long-standing, mutual commitment to the partnership.

Aurivo has a tightly-resourced and dedicated IT team. David highlights the excellent collaboration between our people. "We approach most IT projects with a workshop methodology, bringing everyone in to gain understanding and commitment before building designs and plans. ProCloud totally gets that method of working. With our lean in-house team, we don't have time for anything other than a straightforward approach. ProCloud don't operate with that all too common corporate mindset. They don't overcomplicate things. It's an open, straightforward relationship and we genuinely feel valued as a customer."

Aurivo was clear at the outset that they wanted a strategic, long-term relationship, sharing their business plans and expecting an open and proactive contribution from ProCloud: this has been a consistent feature of our partnership over the years. For ProCloud, investing in a longer-term customer relationship is key to our approach. We understand and cherish the lifetime value of every customer.

David says, "Being outside the main Irish cities, we often feel we are underserved by quality suppliers. With ProCloud, there's a real sense of professional skill and respect. They have great integrity. It is always easy to deal with people who want you to succeed - and we want them to succeed too. It's a truly beneficial partnership."

Aurivo benefits from:

• Application performance increases across the board
• Robust infrastructure for the next five years
• Fast and responsive retail system
• Capacity to handle seasonal peaks
• PAYG model - predictable, value pricing
• Data security and business resilience