Kedington Group "Future Proofs" Lakeland Dairies For Innovation

CAVAN, IRELAND, September 22, 2010 (Press-News.org) Lakeland Dairies, the second largest dairy processing co-operative in Ireland, is known for innovation. With a comprehensive range of high quality dairy products supplied to a global customer base, Lakeland Dairies requires fast, reliable communications. The company turned to Kedington Group to create a network infrastructure that would serve as a platform for continued advances in product development and distribution.

Lakeland Dairies operates in a fifteen county catchment area in the northern half of Ireland. The company's 5 locations house manufacturing, product development, sales and marketing, and administrative operations. It's not unusual for a company as large and innovative as Lakeland Dairies to have geographically dispersed offices. It is rare for such a company to be based in a rural area that offers limited access to high-speed Internet service.

"Given our rural locations, our bandwidth was inadequate, 2 MB at most, unreliable, and quite expensive," explains Gerry Forde, I.T. Operations Manager. "It's not an option for us to move locations, it's extremely beneficial to be near the source of our raw materials, i.e. the farm. We had great confidence that Kedington would design and build the network infrastructure required by critical technologies such as virtualization, disaster recovery & unified communication etc. Kedington delivered a network that supports fast reliable communications that will increase the pace of future product innovation."

Lakeland have moved to a virtualized server environment running Windows Server 2008 R2 (Hyper-V) centralising all critical business applications in its main data centre in Killeshandra. They also realized the importance of having a rapid, efficient and secure Disaster Recovery infrastructure made possible by the robust WAN provided by Kedington.

Kedington Group immediately realized that a state-of-the-art network infrastructure would have to be built from scratch. "Together with Invisible Link, we began by identifying line-of-sight connections at high points around Lakeland Dairy's area of operations and negotiating space on masts," says Adrian Sadlier, Sales Manager at Kedington Group. "We then partnered with Invisible Link (to build out the microwave wireless WAN) and DigiWeb (for ISP services and further WAN links which connect to international locations, including current business locations in the UK). The LANs and WAN were upgraded and we completed a move to HP/3Com infrastructure providing a very cost-effective solution. "

The result is a network infrastructure that provides 100mb of highly reliable bandwidth between Lakeland sites supporting the new centralised environment. With requisite backup links and no single points of failure, operations, communications, and data access are assured for all Lakeland Dairies locations.

"This isn't something we could have accomplished on our own, at least not in a time-frame that would benefit the business," says Turlough Farrelly, I.T. Manager. "Kedington negotiated on our behalf, dealt with the licensing of microwave technology, identified and contracted with an ISP, and completed major network upgrading while our internal IT staff kept current operations moving. Kedington acted as a true business partner. This complicated project was made much easier by having a single supplier relationship that we could count on all the way through."

"The network infrastructure we now have in place provides a foundation on which we can build and deliver a range of new technologies and services to our key stakeholders. We now plan to roll out an internal wireless infrastructure on all sites, interconnected over the new WAN's and we look forward again to working in partnership with Kedington on this project."

For further information contact:
Gillian Breen

Merrion Business Development
http://www.merrionbd.ie