Total Produce starts as it means to go on
By Leslie Faughnan
A spin-off some years ago from Fyffes, Total Produce plc is an Irish-headquartered distributor of fresh produce across Europe.
It is shipping more than a quarter of a billion cases annually of 200 different items through 90 facilities across 19 countries. With an eight-person IT team, Total Produce was an early adopter of virtualisation, according to IT director Neil Fraser.
“We recognised the potential benefits from the earliest days,” he said.” The goal was to contribute to building better systems for the business, but there were specific additional returns from the investment almost immediately.”
These included a smaller physical footprint, reduced energy costs and a new disaster recovery solution.
“When we had invested in a new set of hardware, we shipped the old equipment to our DR site in Britain, connected over the Wan.
The current set of VMs is just replicated there.”
On the main front, Fraser said that, in the company’s current virtualised infrastructure, almost 40 physical servers have been consolidated on three VMware ESX hosts.
“We have by now had excellent experience of the speed and ease of deploying new virtual servers and new applications.”
Assisted through al l of its virtualisation projects by Dublin consultancy DNM Technologies, Total Produce has more recently introduced desktop virtualisation.
