The Customer: About Star Kay White
Star Kay White has been crafting confectionery flavors, syrups, and candy inclusions for the ice cream industry since 1890. If you’ve enjoyed ice cream in the U.S., there’s a good chance you’ve tasted their work. But behind the scenes, producing safe, consistent, high-quality food requires more than great recipes. It demands a reliable IT architecture that runs without interruption.
The Challenge: Reliability Under Pressure
Over the last two decades, Star Kay White has grown substantially, tripling their size in terms of employees, facilities, and production capacity. This growth, coupled with the strict regulatory requirements of the food industry, puts heavy demands on their IT systems. Their existing infrastructure, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) on Dell PowerEdge servers, was nearing end-of-life.
- Aging hardware: Servers were over five years old, with rising maintenance costs and diminishing warranty options.
- Budget constraints: Post-COVID hardware and licensing costs had skyrocketed, making a like-for-like replacement prohibitively expensive.
- No compromise on reliability: Production relies on systems that monitor critical factors such as product temperature. Any downtime could mean discarding entire production runs, resulting in massive losses.
The Solution: Dell PowerStore with Redundancy at the Core
Through months of research and testing, xByte Technologies designed a modern solution built for both performance and resilience:
- Two Dell PowerStore arrays configured in a metro volume for synchronous replication.
- Cluster nodes split across two buildings to ensure operations continue even if one facility experiences an outage.
- GPU-enabled compute nodes to support CCTV workloads on any node, ensuring surveillance continues during failover.
This setup removed single points of failure and allowed for seamless failover between sites—exactly the kind of redundancy their production environment demands.
The xByte Difference: Assistance from Design through Deployment
As a Dell Technologies partner, xByte Technologies was referred to Star Kay White to assist in designing and developing a solution that met their needs. Through a collaborative approach, xByte:
- Explored multiple architecture and pricing options to balance cost, performance, and reliability.
- Engaged Dell and Microsoft specialists to validate technical requirements.
- Provided on-site implementation through xByte’s Solutions Architects, working alongside Star Kay White’s internal IT staff to transfer knowledge.
- Completed a full deployment in just three days, from racked servers to a live cluster, avoiding months of potential delays had the project been handled entirely in-house.
The Outcome: Faster, Stronger, and Future-Proof
The new environment went live over the 4th of July holiday weekend to minimize production disruption. Benefits have been immediate:
- Improved performance: Users reported more responsive systems, thanks to increased compute resources and all-NVMe storage.
- Peace of mind: Redundant storage, compute, networking, and backups mean critical workloads remain safe and available. This solution is able to withstand multiple host failures and still run the environment.
- Future-ready: The design accommodates continued company growth without sacrificing resilience, and is much more flexible than the previous solution.
Key Takeaway
For Star Kay White, this project wasn’t just about upgrading hardware. It was about ensuring uninterrupted production, safeguarding compliance, and enabling the IT team to focus on strategic goals instead of firefighting outages. By partnering with xByte, they received a solution that’s as robust as the flavors they produce.
Contact your xByte account rep or reach out to schedule a call with a Dell Certified solutions architect to discuss an IT solution that meets your business goals.
