Dairylea Cooperative Inc. Case Study

Dairylea's aging infrastructure consisted of three HP EVA storage arrays for their VMware environment, running over 100 applications critical to Dairylea's business units. While the production environment was stable and meeting the requirements, backup and disaster recovery had been a significant challenge for many years. Continued weekly backup failures and the recognition that recovery from a disaster could take over 48 hours compelled the IT team to seek a replacement to their overall backup and DR approach. Jeremy Wheeler, Dairylea's Innovation Architect, and his team spent months looking for a cost-effective solution that would allow the company to better protect critical data and deliver RPOS of less than 24 hours and RTOs of less than 4 hours in the event of a significant outage or disaster in the primary environment. Given a limited staff, Dairylea needed to ensure that the solution would be simple to manage, and provide a straightforward failover process in the event of a real outage. Given cost constraints, Dairylea needed the solution to be bandwidth efficient and deliver replication without impacting users of the production application environment.

Dairylea Cooperative Inc. is the largest milk-marketing organization in the Northeastern United States. The cooperative represents more than 2000 dairy farms that sell more than 6.0 billion pounds of raw milk annually. With more than 100 years of service, Dairylea is a collection of more than a dozen business units, offering everything from laboratory testing to Farm Insurance. With a diverse range of members and offerings, IT is at the heart of Dairylea's success. The cooperative has two IT sites: Syracuse Primary data center and Ithaca DR site 60 miles away.