Driscoll’s Gets the Freshest Berries from Farm to Table with a Talari SD-WAN

For more than a hundred years, the family-owned Driscoll’s has grown the finest quality market-fresh strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. In the past two decades, Driscoll’s has rapidly expanded from its roots in California’s Pajaro Valley to become the largest berry distributor in the world.

Overcome Outages

One of the ways that Driscoll’s delivers fresh, delicious berries is to have highly trained employees inspect each batch of berries after harvest. Once the berries pass inspection, they are immediately cooled at the distribution facility, where they are not touched again to prevent bruising. Within hours, they are on their way to their final destination.

“Fresh berries spoil extremely fast,” says Andrew Longsworth, Lead Network Engineer at Driscoll’s. “Every time that a WAN circuit went down, we lost money due to diminished connectivity between the branches, which impacted our communication and visibility. Our number one priority was to have multiple links at remote sites, so they are always on and always ready,” says Longsworth.

Connectivity for the distribution centers where berries are cooled, inspected and shipped out is business-critical. “Throughout that process, we have to maintain inventory control, warehouse management, QA data and shipping and receiving information,” he says. “If any of those pieces go down, it delays the process overall.”

Driscoll’s has been using a Talari Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) for nearly four years to deliver ultra-reliable WAN connectivity to dozens of locations across North America,
South America and Europe. A Talari SD-WAN brings real-time, packet-level intelligence to Driscoll’s global network, which connects its farms, nurseries, distribution centers,
corporate offices, and data center.

Now, if a WAN link goes down, the day’s harvest isn’t ruined. “Our biggest benefit from Talari is a more reliable network and the ability to deliver 100% uptime,” says Longsworth.

Read the full article here.

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