Kiwifruit marketers Zespri are now officially in 'the cloud” after becoming part of the world's largest move to the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform.
Datacom New Zealand has successfully migrated Zespri International's global SAP computer platform and other applications to Microsoft's infrastructure.
Data about Zespri fruit shipped from New Zealand to 53 countries will be tracked in the cloud.
This involves approximately 230 virtual machines running in the western US Azure data centre.
'Datacom had the flexibility, technical knowledge and can-do attitude to help us evaluate Azure and work toward our target of 100 per cent public cloud,” says Andrew Goodin, Global Manager of Information Systems for Zespri.
'Zespri information held in the cloud infrastructure is updated in real time and available across time zones in the 53 countries in which we sell our fruit.
'We are confident the cloud infrastructure provides a secure and reliable data storage service, and Azure meets all our data management and security requirements.
'Our data is just as secure as it has always been. The IRD has approved Zespri financial data to be held in Azure.”
The migration was seamless, completed ahead of schedule and was so successful that Zespri Asia, Zespri Europe and Zespri New Zealand could begin working from the systems immediately.
Zespri's global kiwifruit sales totalled $1.35 billion in 2013/14 and it operates in 53 countries and across multiple time zones.
The kiwifruit industry is set for strong growth in coming years, aiming to increase export revenue to $3 billion by 2025, which Zespri has factored in to its IT planning.
'You can't be an expert in everything, and we wanted to focus on our core product - kiwifruit - and let our partners Datacom and Microsoft manage our IT infrastructure so we can scale without constraints,” Andrew adds.
'We can bump up Azure performance in minutes by adding additional resources, which is not possible in the on-premises world.
'This means less friction and no interruption to our business operations, which provides Zespri with real value.”
Andrew Goodin, Global Manager of Information Systems for Zespri.
4 comments
Security
Posted on 13-11-2014 22:42 | By GreertonCynic
Microsoft? Really? With another new 0day things are looking more than a bit dodgy. Why not employ your own IT staff with all the money you're making, Andrew?
Simply Ridiculous
Posted on 14-11-2014 10:30 | By Sagacity
Cloud, Significantly more expensive than on-premise architecture. To run 230 A6 Azure cloud servers is 1.5 Million dollars per annum. Even with a significant discount you would be looking at a million dollars per annum absolute minimum. That doesn't include storage costs (extra) traffic costs (extra) support costs (extra). You still have to manage your infrastructure just like you would for on-premise cloud. You could buy you're own data center and fill it for that 5 year cost. Quite simply to compare it for the readers I could spend $600k on hardware and software required to run this many servers and be better off, better equipped, more scalable and have better performance.
I forgot to mention
Posted on 14-11-2014 13:48 | By Sagacity
The statement: 'We can bump up Azure performance in minutes by adding additional resources, which is not possible in the on-premises world." is patently false. In VMWare (on premise cloud) you can add disk, memory and CPU without business interruption with ease. Sure if you run out of physical CPU and memory you will need to buy some more but that does not happen with any regularity in a well planned infrastructure.
Outage
Posted on 20-11-2014 09:29 | By Sagacity
How did the 8 hour outage to your Azure system go the other day? What was that about it being more stable than on premise? lol
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