Cheese makers get hungry for Intel's vPro chips

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The makers of Italian hard cheese Parmigiano-Reggiano are blending old traditions with new technology by implementing Intel's vPro processor-based desktop and server kit to help reduce costs, better analyse data and enhance customer service.

The Research Centre on Animal Production (CPRA) provides agricultural and food production-related information to those involving in the supply chain. It conducts 2.2 million milk analyses each year in addition to handling some five million meteorological records on an annual basis, and must get timely and accurate information to technical advisors, cheese makers and breeders, encompassing about 7,000 farms, to ensure the end product - the cheese - meets the high standards imposed by the brand.

Using vPro-based desktops at both its own research centre and on members' sites, CPRA can more effectively identify, manage and resolve technical issues.

"Often the adoption of IT in the food and farming industry - mostly made of small and medium enterprises - is hindered or delayed by the fear of not being able to tackle technical issues or to sustain high assurance costs," said Giuseppe Veneri, CRPA's president.

"..Intel has given us the solution as we can diagnose a problem in advance and plan to solve it much more effectively."

The CPRA also makes use of a massive database for forecasting things like pests and diseases so that it can inform its members who need to adapt their behaviour accordingly.

It has upgraded the system to run on Intel Xeon 7300 Quad Core processors. Now, data that used to take eight hours to process and analyse takes just an hour and a half.

"We had a business need to increase the number of simulations achieved and improve processing power without having to completely change the model of operation. We think this platform has solved both problems we had with excellent results and we are very satisfied," Veneri said.

While the process of creating Parmigiano-Reggiano is long, involve and steeped in history, modern IT solutions are a key enabler to production, according to Giuseppe Alai, president of the Consorzio di Tutela del Parmigiano-Reggiano.

"This is a clear example of how tradition and innovation can be combined," he said. "The production system of the Parmigiano-Reggiano, which makes adhering to a strict disciplinary code its strongest point, can now rely on an advanced technology that will allow more timely exchange of information between operators in the supply chain, allowing producers to be quicker to act in the production process, and bringing greater efficiency altogether to the system."

Image: Hombre, one of the 7,000 farms working with the CPRA to produce Parmigiano-Reggiano.

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