By Tamara Cryar
In the food industry, successful competitors must act quickly. Costs are high and timelines are short, so it’s imperative that operations are agile, efficient and reliable. After 10 years of steady growth, global flavoring manufacturer Star Kay White realized that their traditional IT infrastructure would no longer suffice and turned to Dell and Intel® for help.
The company replaced outdated infrastructure with Dell storage , networking, firewalls, services and desktops and achieved the following results:
- Increased reliability and simplicity with Hyper-V virtual environments that include the Dell EqualLogic PS Series for flexible, high-capacity storage.
- Improved savings by replacing HP switches with Dell switches. Marty Hettinger, vice president of finance at Star Kay White, said, “We evaluated networking equipment from HP, Dell, Cisco and Ubiquiti. Dell gave us the ability to create a high-bandwidth backbone for our increasing needs, at a fraction of the cost of other vendors.”
- Enabled company growth with Dell networking and storage technologies (the N-Series and S-Series switches) and Dell ProSupport to improve availability without making a huge financial investment.
- Enhanced security and service by deploying two Dell SonicWALL NSA 3600 firewalls in a high-availability configuration.
- Improved mobility for sales personnel with Dell SonicWALL security and eliminated malware infections, reduced risk and accelerated mobile access by setting up a virtual private network (VPN).
- Refined email operations and ensured access from mobile devices, including cell phones, desktops, laptops and even kiosks.
- Improved productivity by adopting new tools and engaging Dell Education Services for personnel training.
- Boosted ROI and reduced expenses to shift focus to more strategic goals.
- Improved service by focusing on future-ready solutions that would boost efficiency and savings, enhance service and facilitate an almost 10 percent increase in yearly sales.
Mikko Peltoniemi, Director of IT, said, “We now have a flexible platform that can support how we want to evolve our business. It’s nice being able to depend on Dell as a strategic partner to provide the information and technologies we need to future-proof our business so we can continue to provide ingredients for many of the world’s most recognized food manufacturers.”
If you’re ready to replace your outdated infrastructure with a centralized, virtualized solution and increase your efficiency, reliability and security, consider the broad portfolio of Dell Storage and Networking solutions.
For more details about how Star Kay White worked with Dell to implement a centralized, virtualized solution, read the Dell Case Study, “Star Kay White keeps its supply chain agile with end-to-end Dell infrastructure.”
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