Goodman Fielder
One of Asia-Pacific’s largest food manufacturers
uses Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) to supercharge
and secure their network.

CASE STUDYKey Points•

Increased data transfer speed tenfold•

Reduced hop count by as many as five, resulting
in a more efficient network path and improved
network performance•

Created a fully redundant network with MVE’s
extra connectivity layer from end to end•

Simplified network provisioning and managementwith MVE via VMware SASE (TM) Orchestrator

Snapshot
Goodman Fielder has more than 70 sites that need toconnect to each other and SAP at all times in order tosuccessfully run their manufacturing operations. As amanufacturer and distributor of essential food, theyneeded to improve speed, reliability, and network
management across their many sites.
By deploying MVE via their VMware SD-WAN, they
have been able to realize these benefits and create asupercharged network from branch to cloud.

Without an extra layer of connectivity underpinningtheir journey to and from the data center, the team wasconcerned about their lack of network redundancy andresilience.
“Before MVE, the data center was a large single pointof failure. If a data center goes down, even just for anhour, the consequences could be disastrous; we wouldn’t
even be able to access the core of our network,” said
Paleothodoros.

About Goodman Fielder

In manufacturing, timing is crucial.

From bread and oil to sugar and condiments, Goodman
Fielder is one of Australia’s largest food manufacturing
companies with at least one of their products found inover 90% of Aussie homes. In addition to Australia, they
operate in New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and New
Caledonia. They’re also the largest producer of chicken,
bread, and snacks in Fiji, and of flour in Papua New Guinea.

“For a lot of our big customers, you have to book in adelivery time slot, and if you miss it, you’ll be lucky to getanother one that same day. So it’s really crucial to haveeverything running on time,” said Paleothodoros.

Goodman Fielder’s purpose is to make everyday foodbetter for everyone, in taste, nutrition, affordability,accessibility, and sustainability.

Challenges
Reliance on the data center“We have 78 sites, including critical manufacturing
sites that operate 24/7,” said Peter Paleothodoros,
Infrastructure Services Manager at Goodman Fielder.
“Every site has its own task; for instance, one site is abakery that will produce fresh sliced bread daily. Anotheris purely for dispatch; another just has raw materials in it.
These sites run 24/7 together with our automated picking
system that needs to be constantly connected to SAP,
so we absolutely cannot afford to have an outage.”Complicated network setup
Goodman Fielder already used MCR for multicloud andcloud-to-cloud connectivity, connecting their AWS andAzure workloads. And while MCR provides the speed,security, and reliability of their data while in the cloud, they
were still having challenges with connecting their morethan 70 on-premises sites reliably.
“With so many sites, we were having issues with routing[from branch to cloud] for the setup we needed,” said
Paleothodoros.
“There was a lot of routing, a lot of subnets, and alimitation with routing all the way through. Managing ourconnectivity from the site was complicated and inefficient.”
not future-proof, not cost-effective, and becoming
increasingly difficult to manage.

“We’re expanding Megaport andMVE across Goodman Fielder
as much as we can. The ease ofuse of the portal, the speed ofgetting services up and running– they’re a godsend.”Peter Paleothodoros,
Infrastructure Services Manager at Goodman Fielder

Solution
Goodman Fielder decided to implement MVE in Sydney
to address these challenges, and the impacts were better
than expected.

Freedom from the data center“MVE solved our reliance on the data center,” said
Paleothodoros.
“With MVE, the fact that everything’s now going direct[to cloud] takes away all the infrastructure we needed togo through. There’s no more hops in my data center.
We’ve actually been able to remove up to five hops in
our network path with MVE.”
They now also have peace of mind with a redundantnetwork with MVE underpinning their branch-to-cloudjourney.
“Hopefully it never does, but if our MVE was to go down,
we’ve now got a secondary path to go through the MVE,”
said Paleothodoros.
“We’ve already done test outages, and everythingworked brilliantly.”

Supercharged speed
With an expedited branch-to-cloud route, the GoodmanFielder team are getting tasks done more quickly andefficiently than ever before.
“Thanks to the removal of all those hops in our network
path, the number one thing our end users have noticed isa better response time,” said Paleothodoros.
As part of reducing their on-prem infrastructure andworking toward a cloud-native network architecture,
Goodman Fielder recently took on the mammoth taskof migrating many of their local file servers to AWS.

“What was taking three days to migrate is now done
overnight – we’ve gotten a tenfold speed increase.
Before MVE, we were getting 1MB per second copy speed.
Now, we’re getting speeds of up to 10MB a second,”
said Paleothodoros.

Simplified network management
Before MVE, Goodman Fielder’s network setup felt
overwhelming to orchestrate and maintain. But now,
they can provision and manage connections all in one
place and optimize middle- and last-mile connectivity inmetros worldwide.
“Our team can now just manage our setup with theVMware SASE Orchestrator. Once [Megaport] is up, it’s up.
We only have to think about what’s sitting on top of theMegaport layer; that has been a huge advantage for us.
The management of the service is just so easy,”
said Paleothodoros.

Future plans
Goodman Fielder has had great success with the initial
MVE project and are looking at future implementation.
“We currently have a Trans-Tasman link to our New
Zealand data center, but we’re planning to plug this data
center directly into MVE using Megaport. After this, we’ll
definitely keep connecting more of our sites as well,” said
Paleothodoros.
“This is definitely just the beginning of our experience
with MVE.”Goodman Fielder use of the Megaport SDN

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With thanks toReimagine connectivity.
Megaport is a leading provider of Network as a Service (NaaS) solutions. The company’s global Software Defined
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