Case Study: Dairylea Cooperative Inc. achieves minutes‑level RTOs and sub‑minute VM backups with HPE SimpliVity

Dairylea Cooperative Inc. - Customer Case Study

Dairylea Cooperative is a billion-dollar, Northeastern U.S. milk‑marketing organization serving more than 2,000 farms with two IT sites (Syracuse primary and Ithaca DR, 60 miles apart). Its aging SAN environment and failing weekly backups left recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) unacceptable—backups could take 8–48+ hours and full disaster recovery could exceed 48 hours—while limited staff and budget required a simple, low‑impact solution.

Dairylea deployed SimpliVity OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure (four CN‑3000s in Syracuse, two in Ithaca), replacing servers, SAN and legacy backup with a VM‑centric, deduplicated, replication‑enabled platform managed through VMware vCenter. Backups shrank from 8–10 hours to under a minute, RPOs are now measured in minutes and RTOs dropped from days to under an hour (often <60 seconds), with fast failover/testing, lower cost than traditional backup replacements, and reduced operational overhead.

Dairylea Cooperative Inc.

Jeremy Wheeler

Innovation Architect