Leading Agricultural Producer selects Cloud Creek to Grow with the Oracle Database Appliance
PROVIDING FRESH BERRIES TO THE WORLD
Rooted in a long tradition of family farming, Reiter Affiliated Companies is the largest fresh multi-berry producer in the world, growing Driscoll’s proprietary varieties of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries year round in the United States, Baja California, Central Mexico, Portugal, Morocco, and Peru.
The Reiter family began farming in the San Francisco Bay area and by the turn of the century had migrated south where Joseph “Ed” Reiter and R.O “Dick” Driscoll began growing their own Sweetbriar strawberries variety. The company soon became one of the nation’s leaders in the agricultural industry, expanding into new geographies and products and developing new farming techniques.
“ODA has put us at ease, we are very self-sufficient now.”
At the heart of the success of this multi-generational farming company has been the ownership’s belief in fundamental values and guiding principles, including honesty, fairness and respect—values that are framed along the corridors of every office, from the smallest ranch operation to Reiter’s corporate offices in Oxnard, California. These values have defined a clear path for integrity to flow throughout the organization.
KEEPING OPERATIONS ON TRACK
At the core of Reiter’s operations are the farm workers who harvest berries every day, so it’s critical to keep these key contributors satisfied and committed to their jobs. The company’s values help to ensure satisfaction, and this includes a commitment to pay every worker promptly and accurately.
Reiter pays its workers every week based on the quantity and quality of fruit they collect. Not surprisingly, if the company is ever late issuing paychecks—or if they’re inaccurate— this could impact worker satisfaction and create a problem for a time-sensitive business such as Reiter’s.
With affiliates in the U.S., Mexico, South America, North Africa, and Europe, and its business continuing to expand, Reiter needed an ultra-reliable and available IT infrastructure that wouldn’t fail during those critical pay events. The system also needed to be sufficiently powerful and scalable to support other critical business processes, such as finance and payroll.
A few years ago, the company found that its existing infrastructure, an Oracle clustered database solution built around a set of commodity servers, was beginning to show its age and IT sometimes struggled unpredictably to meet the company’s strict requirements for availability and performance. The time was right to look for a better solution.
INVESTING IN ORACLE DATABASE APPLIANCE
Since Reiter’s IT staff was relatively small, the company engaged Cloud Creek Systems to help it transition to a more reliable and cost-effective IT platform. The Oracle Gold Partner arranged a proof-of-concept (POC) demonstration using Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), a completely integrated package of software, compute, networking and storage optimized for performance, simplicity, and scale. Impressed with the “test drive,” the CIO green-lighted the purchase of four ODAs.
Cloud Creek helped set up the first appliance, sharing its expertise with Reiter and troubleshooting any initial issues. After that, Reiter took over the process, adding three more ODAs and maintaining the whole system on its own. To ensure real-time backups, Reiter later added Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance to the system.
Today, Reiter runs Oracle E-Business Suite applications on its ODA platform, providing a full range of capabilities to manage its core business processes.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
Reiter has been reaping significant benefits from its move to Oracle Database Appliance.
Budget flexibility: Reiter has garnered significant savings from its move to ODA, which provides budget flexibility with “sub-capacity licensing” and allows for predictable, planned, and phased spending. As the company grows, it can add new compute power to the appliance as needed.
Cost savings: Cost estimates from an initial business case confirmed that ODA could help Reiter save 50% compared to its previous commodity server environment. Savings would include reduced administrative costs from easier day-to-day administration and maintenance.
Risk reduction: Moving to an integrated hardware-and-software solution is reducing risk for Reiter. With a single-vendor approach, system reliability and availability are assured for key payroll and financial processes. The company’s system administrators are no longer worried about working overtime to handle outages that impact payroll cycles.
Performance: Oracle Database Appliance reduces downtime, while its natively integrated hardware and software drives faster throughput. Perfect for a company that can’t afford slow or spotty performance.
Ease of management: With all the key system components integrated in a single engineered system, Reiter can more easily manage its IT infrastructure on a single, easy-to-maintain frame. “ODA has put us at ease,” says Mike Orechoff, Sr. DBA, Reiter Affiliated Companies. “We are very self-sufficient now.”
Scalability: As Reiter grows, it can “turn on” more processing cores to support that growth. That’s a big benefit as the company expands into new geographies worldwide and needs additional capacity—but saves money until that’s needed.
