From bread and oil to sugar and condiments, Goodman Fielder is one of Australia’s largest food manufacturing companies with at least one of its products found in over 90% of Australian homes. In addition to Australia, they operate in New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia. They are also the largest producer of chicken, bread, and snacks in Fiji, and of flour in Papua New Guinea.
Goodman Fielder’s purpose is to make everyday food better for everyone—in taste, nutrition, affordability, accessibility, and sustainability.
THE CHALLENGE
“Each site has its task; For example, a site is a bakery that will produce fresh sliced bread every day. Another is purely for dispatch; another only has raw materials. These sites run 24/7 along with our automated collection system that needs to be constantly connected to SAP, so we can’t afford to have an outage.”
Without an additional layer of connectivity to support their journey to and from the data center, the team was concerned about a lack of network redundancy and resiliency.
“Before MVE, the data center was a huge single point of failure. If a data center goes down, even for just an hour, the consequences could be disastrous; we couldn’t even access the core of our network,” Paleothodoros said.
In manufacturing, time is of the essence.
“For a lot of our big customers, you have to book a delivery time, and if you miss it, you’ll be lucky to get another one that same day. So everything must work on time, » Paleothodoros said.
Goodman Fielder has already used MCR for multi-cloud and cloud-to-cloud connectivity, connecting its AWS and Azure workloads. And while MCR provides the speed, security, and reliability of their data while in the cloud, they still had challenges connecting their 70+ on-premises sites reliably.
“With so many sites, we were having trouble with routing [from the branch to the cloud] for the setup we needed,” Paleothodoros said.
“There was a lot of routing, a lot of subnets, and a limitation with full routing. Managing our connectivity from the site was complicated and inefficient.” it is not future-proofed, it is not profitable and it is increasingly difficult to manage.
THE SOLUTION
Goodman Fielder decided to implement MVE in Sydney to address these challenges and the impacts were better than expected.
Gained freedom from the data center: “MVE resolved our dependency on the data center,” Paleothodoros said.
“With MVE, the fact that everything now goes directly [to the cloud] removes all the infrastructure that we needed to go through. There are no more hops in my data center. We were able to eliminate up to five hops in our network path with MVE.”
Now they also have peace of mind with a redundant network with MVE supporting their journey from the branch to the cloud.
« Hopefully it never happens, but if our MVE were to fail, we now have a secondary path to get through the MVE, » Paleothodoros said. “We have already done test cuts and everything worked brilliantly.”
Before MVE, the Goodman Fielder network setup was overwhelming to orchestrate and maintain. But now, they can provision and manage connections in one place and optimize last- and mid-mile connectivity in metropolitan areas around the world.
“Our team can now simply manage our setup with VMware SASE Orchestrator. Once [Megaport] is up, it’s up. We just have to think about what sits on top of the Megaport layer; that has been a great advantage for us. Service management is very easy,” said Paleothodoros.
MEGAPORT AS A LONG-TERM PROJECT
“We currently have a Trans-Tasman link to our New Zealand data center, but we are planning to connect this data center directly to MVE using Megaport. After this, we will continue to connect more of our sites as well,” Paleothodoros said.
“This is just the beginning of our experience with MVE.”