Summary: Based in Virginia, Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest pork producer and processor with $15b in revenue, 50k employees globally and 45 plants in the US alone. It began trialling public cloud services around 2013 and in 2016 revealed it was using Microsoft Office 365 as well as AWS. We have some more details about its continued adoption of cloud services.
Details: Smithfield has selected three cloud providers to fulfil specific functions, enabled by Equinix and its Cloud Exchange, which provides direct connections to all three as well as Smithfield’s own MPLS network from a single site. Smithfield has built a SD-WAN in two Equinix data centres, one each on the US east and west coasts, for security and business continuity. Azure’s global network backbone was the driver behind using it to connect all its locations, enabling Smithfield to route and replicate traffic between regions without leaving the Azure network. Azure’s other selling points were security and its commitment to the enterprise, as well as Office 365, Active Directory and single sign-on capabilities. Smithfield is also using Virtustream’s ERP (SAP) hosting with a native VMware format making it easy to scale on-premise VMware resources to Virtustream, and the ability to put legacy systems on the same network as cloud resources.
Azure: Smithfield began outsourcing its data centres to a managed service provider as early as 2008 and was looking to migrate hundreds of applications to the cloud before that contract expired. It started by migrating apps to the Azure cloud infrastructure platform, then used Azure Backup to back up both on-premise and Azure servers, and Azure Site Recovery to reduce application downtime and provide business continuity. Other data is backed up locally to Microsoft Azure StorSimple devices. Smithfield is using Azure Log Analytics to optimise Azure resources and Cloudyn (acquired by Microsoft last year) to track costs and get infrastructure optimisation tips. Azure Application Insights has helped it streamline and improve the performance of its applications, Azure Security Center was deployed for security, while Azure Resource Manager has enabled it to standardise and automate infrastructure elements that were previously done manually. Smithfield is now starting to use Azure Automation features as well as Azure HDInsight to quickly spin up Hadoop clusters.
Results: Moving to Azure, according to Smithfield, has enabled it to slash data centre costs by 60%. It has reduced the number of servers from over 1.2k to 650 and the number of applications from 320 to 98. New applications can be up and running in a day, compared with 30 to 60 days, and Smithfield has had zero downtime with Azure, compared with daily outages previously.
Angle: A very good example of large-scale enterprise migration to cloud and how all the pieces – MSP/service provider, interconnection/SD-WAN, cloud infrastructure and SaaS, third party applications, multiple clouds and various optimization, security and analytics tools – are all part of the puzzle. Also another example of how many applications run in the enterprise and how long and difficult a process it is to get that over to the cloud.
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