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Customer Case Studies

Wolverine Packing Company

Maintains Smooth Operations During Planned and Unplanned Server Outages
Industry
Food Distribution
Company
Wolverine Packing Company is one of the largest U.S. distributors of meat products to the wholesale, retail, and food services industries. Based in Detroit, Michigan, the company distributed a full line of meat products for more than sixty years, and is now in its fourth generation of family ownership. With a 110,000 square-foot state-of-the-art facility and approximately 500 employees, Wolverine provides services that include prepackaging, processing, private labeling, portion control, steak cutting, and national distribution.
Challenge

In the food industry, any type of business interruption represents a potential catastrophe. Large plants process, store, and move tens of thousands of pounds of meat products on any given day. These facilities must be able to fulfill, ship, and deliver customer orders virtually nonstop or risk massive amounts of spoiled product. The emergence of enterprise IT systems has allowed companies like Wolverine Packing to handle larger volumes of business without sacrificing quality or safety.

However, companies such as Wolverine still need a way to perform scheduled maintenance without interrupting daily operations. They also need to have a plan and process in place so that they can respond quickly and effectively in the event of a disaster. “Perishable product has got to get out the door,” explained John Kuriwchak, Wolverine IT manager. “For our system to even be down for a day, it would put us behind quite a bit. We’d have to manually ship product, and any corrupted data would take a long time to recoup.” Although the main server at Wolverine was robust, Kuriwchak recognized that Wolverine needed a high-availability and disaster recovery system to enable future growth.

Results
  • Mitigated the risk of a primary server outage which could potentially result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue
  • Replicated and auto-synchronized mission-critical data to secondary backup system to be used in the event of a planned or unplanned outage
  • Deployed a backup system in less than two hours following a hardware malfunction, ensuring the business continuity that is especially critical in the food industry
Applications
  • High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Even though iCluster is in the background, it is critical to our enterprise—and the support team at Rocket has been invaluable to our learning how to use the product.
Cheryl Geesey
IT Director
Wolverine Packing Company