Origina wins European IT excellence award for its virtualised solution with Lakeland Dairies

Published 9th March 2010

Origina, a leading Irish IT services company, today announced that it has won “Best SMB Solutions Provider” at the 2010 European IT Excellence Awards in London. Origina won the award for a project they completed in partnership with the Lakeland Dairies IT team where they assisted in the successful design and implementation of a new virtualised environment for Lakeland Dairies. The integrated solution has enabled Lakeland to significantly decrease the risk of downtime, reduce costs, lower carbon emissions and improve delivery times across the organisation.

The European IT Excellence Awards recognise best practices in customer solutions by IT providers across Europe. As the only Irish technology company to win an award at this year’s event, Origina beat stiff competition in its category including shortlisted companies from the UK, Italy and Serbia. The judges were particularly impressed by Origina’s ability to work with the Lakelands IT team to unify and simplify Lakeland’s complex IT infrastructure.

Lakeland Dairies Group is Ireland’s second largest dairy co-op and processes more than one billion litres of milk annually. Headquartered in Cavan, the Group has more than 600 employees employed in five locations across the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK. It exports to markets throughout Europe, America, Asia, Africa and other international markets.

Lakeland’s IT systems play an integral role in the complete food process from farm to retail. Following growth through a number of mergers and acquisitions, Lakeland built-up a large number of disparate IT systems and servers in several office locations and data centres. Based on both its strong infrastructure architecture experience, and ability to work closely with the Lakeland IT team, Origina was awarded a contract to work with Lakeland to help consolidate all IT systems, implement a more effective disaster recovery solution and perform a complete infrastructure refresh for the Lakeland Group.

Origina consultants, working in partnership with Lakeland’s own IT team designed and installed a Compellent storage solution which is an ideal fit for Lakeland’s new centralised, virtualised infrastructure which replaced all of the existing physical servers and storage devices across the Lakeland Dairies Group. Some of the results of the solution are as follows:
- The number of servers was reduced from 35 in its multiple locations to just two virtualised servers in head office, with an additional two servers in a nearby site for disaster recovery;
- 70% saving on power, cooling and electricity costs, with a corresponding reduction in carbon emissions;
- All wintel based disaster recovery has been reduced from 5 days to under 2 hours.

The new highly available and scalable solution includes two IBM servers to run the new virtualised environment, SAN storage from Compellent, along with Microsoft’s HyperV and System Center management software. In addition to providing implementation assistance on this project, Origina also provides comprehensive ongoing training, support and strategic advice.

Turlough Farrelly, IT manager, Lakeland Dairies, “We believe that working in conjunction with Origina, Lakeland has one of the most advanced IT infrastructures in the country right now. The new architecture is easy to manage, resilient and ensures all of our systems, servers and data are always highly-available. Thanks to this virtualised and consolidated solution, we are also seeing a significant reduction in overall costs.”

Marc Flanagan, business development director, Origina, said, “We are honoured to win this prestigious award which recognises Origina’s ability to perform and compete at the highest levels on the international stage. We are delighted that our ‘teaming’ model of working closely with the customers own IT team has enabled us to achieve this recognition. Lakeland Dairies has become one of Ireland’s most successful food production companies by placing technology and innovation at the heart of its business.”