Highest data and service availability for failsafe production

High standards for trading, expanded customer demands in terms of quality and freshness, strict egal guidelines: modern food production is facing a wide variety of challenges. Production needs to run reliably in every possible way, often around the clock, as businesses cannot afford downtimes. Many production processes are data-driven these days. Accordingly, this calls for IT systems with high availability that ensure operations even when individual components are down. For this reason, one of the requirements laid out by the management of Bayerische Milchindustrie eG (BMI), a cooperatively run dairy company with nine production sites in the German states of Bavaria, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, was that no system should be down for more than five minutes. This requirement also applied for the production site in Jessen in Saxony-Anhalt that was to be modernized. Fresh cheese is produced and then sent out for delivery there every day. The modernization of the site – including new production buildings and systems – also meant that the IT systems had to be replaced.

The IT specialists lacked the know-how and experience with using high-availability systems and availability groups, so Trivadis was called in to create such a solution. In the computing centre in Jessen, we implemented Microsoft SQL Server Availability Groups with two computer nodes for production. These availability groups provide automatic failovers in the event of a failure. Production is managed in parallel via two nodes – if one computer fails, the machines will still keep running. Trivadis was able to assist BMI with a system failure outside of business hours already during the project phase. This experience emphasized once again how critical the IT systems are for production, which further increased the management’s awareness for the matter. As a result, a Service Level Agreement was agreed with Trivadis – essentially as insurance that operations would run smoothly around the clock.

The high availability of the systems for BMI’s production is critical to the company. The Trivadis solution and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) ensure that the dairy company’s IT operations can run at the required level. This minimizes the risk of a loss of production considerably. The IT specialists thus adhere to the stipulations of the management and are able to focus on upcoming innovations.

Using modern dairy technology, Bayerische Milchindustrie eG produces high-quality dry, fresh and cheese products at nine production sites in the German states of Bavaria, SaxonyAnhalt and Thuringia. The cooperative invests continually in expanding its facilities to ensure the competitiveness of its products. In the past two years, the focus was on the strategic development of the dairy factory in Jessen, Saxony-Anhalt. Production capacities were expanded considerably here and the technological foundation was laid to be able to process the milk produced here on site into dried products for industrial use.