Iowa Select Farms Case Study

Business Overview

Iowa Select Farms, based in Iowa Falls, is the largest pork producer in Iowa. The company has been producing high-quality pork for over 20 years and is committed to meeting or exceeding all requirements in efforts to protect the environment and ensure proper care and well-being of swine. With nearly 550 swine farms across the state, Iowa Select Farms is one of the leading economic engines to Iowa’s rural communities through employing more than 1,000 people, contracting with more than 345 farm families and supporting hundreds of local businesses throughout the state. To learn more, visit www.iowaselect.com.

Business Challenge

Iowa Select Farms was in dire need of an upgraded core infrastructure. Improving where and how this new system would operate was pivotal for the company in order to facilitate the new technology initiatives it had envisioned in all of its member locations.

They needed a complete restructure and redesign of an on-site corporate data center to create an active/active DR environment that would be compatible with Microsoft Hyper-V. Without the implementation of a solid infrastructure, any new initiatives were guaranteed to be flaky and inflexible.

Solution

LightEdge had recently been involved with Iowa Select Farms on a few smaller-scale projects, so they were the obvious partner when two new technology initiatives arose. LightEdge had proven their capabilities in an array of offerings, and Iowa Select Farms was confident about the quality of service they could expect on this huge revamp project.

After analyzing their compute power and overall resource consumption, they found Cisco UCS blade chassis to be the best fit for the long term. LightEdge and Cisco had an extremely close relationship with one another that was vital in ensuring the highest integrity of the server infrastructure for Iowa Select Farms.

The project resulted in a solid, stable, high performing infrastructure that allowed Iowa Select to deliver the new technology initiatives to all of its member locations, and LightEdge’s expertise and assistance helped to eliminate any “hiccups” along the way.

From implementation to delivery, Iowa Select Farm’s overall experience with the transition and LightEdge’s support was very positive. Iowa Select Farms is a pioneer in the industry thanks to their utilization of the latest in production technologies and techniques, and implementing new processes like these has enabled them to stay ahead of ever-evolving technology and their competition.

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