Manufacturing & Supply Chain

Novi, the proactive managed services provider, has announced that it has designed and implemented an all new IT infrastructure for O’Brien Fine Foods in a €450,000 deal. The new infrastructure is designed to enable mobile working for employees as well as increased security, reliability and performance. Novi will monitor and manage the infrastructure.

O’Brien Fine Foods is a family-run food company that specialises in supplying cooked meats products to the Irish and UK markets, best known for its Brady Family and Homebird brands.

Having undergone steady growth in the past number of years, O’Brien Fine Foods recently carried out a €14 million, 8,000sqm expansion at its headquarters in Timahoe, Co Kildare. To meet customer demand, O’Brien Fine Foods operates a 24-hour production environment, requiring ‘always-on’ IT systems. The company’s expansion put the old IT infrastructure under increased strain, driving the need for a new infrastructure.

Having worked closely with O’Brien Fine Foods for a number of years, Novi had an in-depth knowledge of the company’s needs and was well placed to design and implement the new platform. Novi helps customers to grow through better IT and focuses on implementing IT solutions that help create high-performance businesses. Following an initial assessment, Novi updated O’Brien Fine Foods’ infrastructure to deliver increased security, performance and reliability.

The first step was to install a new 10 gigabit backbone network that provides 1GB Wi-Fi across O’Brien Fine Foods’ entire facility. The higher network speeds enable the company’s employees to work wirelessly from their laptops or mobile devices anywhere on the site.

Novi also deployed a Fortinet Firewall cluster at the core of the new infrastructure to ensure very strong security. This allows the internal network to be segmented to avoid any potentially damaging event impacting on the core production systems.

Novi also installed perimeter firewalls that incorporate two-factor authentication to maximise security for anybody connecting to the network from a remote location.

Finally, Novi employed HPE and Microsoft technologies to make O’Brien Fine Foods’ servers accessible through the cloud. This provides O’Brien Fine Foods with systems that are highly available right across the business campus.

Enda Duffy, IT manager, O’Brien Fine Foods, said: “We were really impressed with Novi’s infrastructure design and choice of technologies to implement. This project has provided us with an infrastructure that improves our business performance and IT reliability, while maintaining the highest level of security. It has also given us an unparalleled level of flexibility. The increased network speed means that our employees can now work efficiently and effectively from anywhere in the facility, from either their laptops or their mobile devices.”

George O’Dowd, managing director, Novi, said: “Having worked closely with O’Brien Fine Foods over the past few years it has been great to see the company grow and evolve into what it is today. Novi has over 15 years’ experience of implementing high-performance IT solutions. We’re passionate about helping customers grow through better IT and so we were ideally placed to guide O’Brien Fine Foods through this project.

“O’Brien Fine Foods now has a reliable and high-performance infrastructure that will enable the company to continue to grow as it strives to meet increasing customer demand. We’re delighted that they’re already seeing the benefits of the work that has been done, and we will continue to provide proactive support to guarantee that they get the most out of this new infrastructure.”