About Goodman Fielder
From bread and oil to sugar and condiments, Goodman Fielder is one of Australia’s largest food manufacturing companies with at least one of their products found in over 90% of Aussie homes. In addition to Australia, they operate in New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia. They’re 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.
Key Points
- Increased data transfer speed tenfold.
- Reduced hop count by as many as five, resulting in a more efficient network path and improved network performance.
- Created a fully redundant network with MVE’s extra connectivity layer from end to end.
- Simplified network provisioning and management with MVE via VMware SASE™ Orchestrator.
Case Study Snapshot
Goodman Fielder has more than 70 sites that need to connect to each other and SAP at all times in order to successfully run their manufacturing operations. As a manufacturer and distributor of essential food, they needed to improve speed, reliability, and network management across their many sites.
By deploying MVE via their VMware SD-WAN, they have been able to realize these benefits and create a supercharged network from branch to cloud.
Challenges
Reliance on the data center
“We have 78 sites, including critical manufacturing sites that operate 24/7,” said Peter Paleothodoros, Infrastructure Services Manager at Goodman Fielder.
“Every site has its own task; for instance, one site is a bakery that will produce fresh sliced bread daily. Another is purely for dispatch; another just has raw materials in it. These sites run 24/7 together with our automated picking system that needs to be constantly connected to SAP, so we absolutely cannot afford to have an outage.”
Without an extra layer of connectivity underpinning their journey to and from the data center, the team was concerned about their lack of network redundancy and resilience.
“Before MVE, the data center was a large single point of failure. If a data center goes down, even just for an hour, the consequences could be disastrous; we wouldn’t even be able to access the core of our network,” said Paleothodoros.
In manufacturing, timing is crucial.
“For a lot of our big customers, you have to book in a delivery time slot, and if you miss it, you’ll be lucky to get another one that same day. So it’s really crucial to have everything running on time,” said Paleothodoros.
Complicated network setup
Goodman Fielder already used MCR for multicloud and cloud-to-cloud connectivity, connecting their AWS and Azure workloads. And while MCR provides the speed, security, and reliability of their data while in the cloud, they were still having challenges with connecting their more than 70 on-premises sites reliably.
“With so many sites, we were having issues with routing [from branch to cloud] for the setup we needed,” said Paleothodoros.
“There was a lot of routing, a lot of subnets, and a limitation with routing all the way through. Managing our connectivity from the site was complicated and inefficient.” not future-proof, not cost-effective, and becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
Solution
Goodman Fielder decided to implement MVE in Sydney to address these challenges, and the impacts were better than expected.
Freedom from the data center
“MVE solved our reliance on the data center,” said Paleothodoros.
“With MVE, the fact that everything’s now going direct [to cloud] takes away all the infrastructure we needed to go through. There’s no more hops in my data center. We’ve actually been able to remove up to five hops in our network path with MVE.”
They now also have peace of mind with a redundant network with MVE underpinning their branch-to-cloud journey.
“Hopefully it never does, but if our MVE was to go down, we’ve now got a secondary path to go through the MVE,” said Paleothodoros.
“We’ve already done test outages, and everything worked brilliantly.”
Supercharged speed
With an expedited branch-to-cloud route, the Goodman Fielder team are getting tasks done more quickly and efficiently than ever before.
“Thanks to the removal of all those hops in our network path, the number one thing our end users have noticed is a better response time,” said Paleothodoros.
As part of reducing their on-prem infrastructure and working toward a cloud-native network architecture, Goodman Fielder recently took on the mammoth task of migrating many of their local file servers to AWS.
“What was taking three days to migrate is now done overnight – we’ve gotten a tenfold speed increase. Before MVE, we were getting 1MB per second copy speed. Now, we’re getting speeds of up to 10MB a second,” said Paleothodoros.
Simplified network management
Before MVE, Goodman Fielder’s network setup felt overwhelming to orchestrate and maintain. But now, they can provision and manage connections all in one place and optimize middle- and last-mile connectivity in metros worldwide.
“Our team can now just manage our setup with the VMware SASE Orchestrator. Once [Megaport] is up, it’s up. We only have to think about what’s sitting on top of the Megaport layer; that has been a huge advantage for us. The management of the service is just so easy,” said Paleothodoros.
Future Plans
Goodman Fielder has had great success with the initial MVE project and are looking at future implementation.
“We currently have a Trans-Tasman link to our New Zealand data center, but we’re planning to plug this data center directly into MVE using Megaport. After this, we’ll definitely keep connecting more of our sites as well,” said Paleothodoros.
“This is definitely just the beginning of our experience with MVE.”