Delivering Mission-Critical Applications at the Industrial Edge
Customer description
Ondulati e Imballaggi del Friuli is a leading manufacturer of corrugated packaging solutions in the EU. They are a critical part of the European supply chain for several Global 1000 CPG companies, as well as a key supplier for many other local customers. Production takes place in four factories that occupy a total area of over 100,000 square meters, and uses state-of-the-art machinery for the production of corrugated cardboard packaging. Their R&D laboratory creates innovative solutions for delivering greater protection and visibility of packaged goods. Company operations are geographically distributed across 3 different cities (Villesse, Venzone, and Cormons) in northeast Italy.
Challenge: Mission-critical industrial control applications
Customer needed a highly reliable, agile, flexible, scalable, and performant infrastructure that could be implemented within the constraints of a limited budget and operated/managed without the need for highly specialized personnel. They needed a solution which can run their mission-critical production, R&D, and business applications across multiple sites, as well as the ability to rapidly restore operations in the event of a catastrophic outage.
Solution
Assisted by local partners Office Point and ConsulPartner, customer deployed NodeWeaver Edge clusters in 3 locations. First cluster is located in customer's Main facility (HQ - Villesse), running a number of applications which support global operations as well as local production services, while the second cluster is located at the production site in Venzone, and runs the production control applications which support that facility. Since NodeWeaver is a software-only solution, partners and customer were completely free to select the server type, configuration, and manufacturer which was ideally suited for their requirements, and NodeWeaver' Service features are used to backup these environments locally to NAS devices for rapid restoration.
Within the main HQ facility in Villesse, the production cluster runs in one building, and replicates to another building on the campus to provide local DR. The customer had a few older servers which they had previously decommissioned, and given NodeWeaver's flexibility regarding hardware, it can easily extend the useful life of older servers, so the partners simply repurposed that hardware to set up the local HQ campus DR cluster. For wide-area DR, the distance between the two main production sites is approximately 80 km so the production NodeWeaver clusters at these sites are replicating between each other (HQ to Venzone and Venzone to HQ), so each site can quickly failover operations to the other site in the event of an extended outage at either location.
The Right Choice
Customer is extremely pleased with the results achieved with NodeWeaver and local partners Office Point and ConsulPartner.
“It has exceeded our expectations. After an initial period of calibration and adjustment, we are running in production with all the advanced, enterprise-class features needed to run our mission-critical production operations. We evaluated other platforms and solutions, but none of them could match NodeWeaver's combination of reliability, simplicity, flexibility, and value. We are extremely impressed with NodeWeaver as well as the level of service from their partners Office Point and ConsulPartner” concludes Mr. Adriano Corbatto, Ondulati e Imballaggi del Friuli EDP Manager.
