Moino Colombo upgrades infrastructure to ensure business continuity
A company specializing in flour production revamps its server and network infrastructure to ensure 24/7 business continuity, enhancing functionality and improving user experience.
| Customer: | Industry: | Location: |
|---|---|---|
| Molino Anselmo Colombo | Manufacturing | Paderno d’Adda (LC), Italy |
Allied Telesis has proven to be a valuable partner, providing advanced devices that ensure redundancy and fault tolerance, optimizing the network and minimizing downtime.
System Project Manager, Agomir
Founded in 1882, Molino Anselmo Colombo S.r.l. is a historic company specializing in flour production, dedicated through generations to its craft and maintaining a strong connection to milling traditions.
Molino Colombo is renowned for its commitment to quality raw materials and excellence in its grain-milling processes, offering a wide range of flours used in both the bakery and confectionery sectors.
Its customer base includes bakeries, restaurants, and food professionals who have trusted the quality and reliability of its products for years.
Balancing innovation with tradition, the company is dedicated to providing natural and sustainable flours, remaining a benchmark in the Italian milling industry.
The objectives of the project
The project arose from the need to modernize an outdated communications infrastructure, addressing both the server components and the network equipment.
Recent storage failures had caused significant slowdowns in daily operations, with resolution times spanning several days and a substantial impact on business performance. These incidents underscored structural vulnerabilities in the existing infrastructure.
In response, a high-reliability approach was implemented to ensure 24-hour business continuity.
The solution includes duplicated, physically separated server rooms, paired with a resilient, high-performance network infrastructure.
The objective is to guarantee uninterrupted operation of production management systems, office services, and other business functions, all while enhancing the user experience for employees, partners, and suppliers.
Business objectives as a guide for technology choices
To achieve business objectives, state-of-the-art technologies were selected in the design phase to ensure business continuity, reliability, and the capacity to handle failures without disrupting operations.
For a resilient server structure, cluster servers were deployed in two separate data center rooms, mitigating risks associated with physical failures or critical incidents in a single room. Each room features a DataCore-based hyperconvergence cluster that integrates computing, networking, and storage resources, reducing downtime and simplifying IT management.
To support both data centers, the Allied Telesis networking solution was implemented, delivering high reliability and minimizing risks of critical failures and single points of failure, while also offering high speed and flexibility.
The network is built on Allied Telesis x930-28GSTX switches, chosen for their dependability and high performance. Configured in VCStacks with 10Gb links, these switches serve as network cores and are situated in separate server rooms. The servers and peripheral racks—equipped with Allied Telesis Access Switches—are cross-connected with dual paths to ensure redundancy and availability. All network traffic flows through the two x930 switches, supporting requests from servers, production equipment, grain milling systems, raw material and finished goods warehouses, as well as flour bagging and business management processes.
This collaboration and the implemented devices have elevated network efficiency and performance standards, ensuring seamless experiences for internal users, customers, and partners, who now benefit from uninterrupted and reliable service.
The devices
The network infrastructure is built around the x930 Series, a family of high-performance switches equipped with redundant power supplies to maintain functionality even in the event of a power supply failure. These switches support interfaces up to 40Gb, enabling ultra-high-performance network configurations. All x930 Series devices support virtual stacking, which enhances reliability.
Allied Telesis’ Virtual Chassis Stacking (VCStack™) allows two or more switches to operate as a single appliance, delivering high reliability for the entire infrastructure. This setup ensures a robust and resilient network capable of supporting continuous operations.
Results and future developments
The implementation of these technologies has enhanced the security and availability of data and services. With a robust network infrastructure, hyperconverged architecture, and distributed servers in separate rooms, the company can withstand the loss of an entire server room without compromising operations, significantly reducing the risk of outages.
Redundant systems and careful design ensure constant access to information, even in emergencies. This resilient network not only bolsters reliability but also lays a solid foundation for future growth. Such an approach allows daily operations to continue seamlessly, ensuring rapid responses to business needs and uninterrupted service for customers.
