Southcorp Wines has selected Krone ’s PremisNET Bronze Cat 5e and Krone Fibre optic solutions to upgrade and futureproof its IT&T network infrastructure for key winemaking, distribution and production sites in Victoria and South Australia.
“We are progressively installing Krone PremisNET Bronze Cat 5e and Krone fibre solutions,” said Byron Moult-Smith, communications and technology support for Southcorp’s South Australian and Victorian operations.
“We outsource the remote management of our local area and wide area network infrastructure to IBM GSA whose main data centre is in Tullamarine, Victoria, and they, in turn, work with various Southcorp IT&T project managers.”
A 30,000 square meters international distribution centre in Adelaide dovetails with the adjacent Mackenzie transport centre which handles Southcorp’s container packaging.
“As well as being integrated for the smooth and climate-controlled transfer of wines in containers, the communications network for the two centres is also connected by a Krone PremisNET structured fibre optic system,” said Moult-Smith.
“We actually run two networks throughout the Southcorp group – one for our information systems such as financials and data and voice and the other, which is site dependent, is a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system for line management of the winemaking.”
“Most of our fibre communications networks are local campus-style connections for sites that span anything up to one kilometre in width, such as Nuriootpa and Karadoc,” Moult-Smith added.
Neil Martin, communications co-ordinator at Nuriootpa, explains that the local area network for which he is responsible has 12 network nodes using Krone equipment.
“Nuriootpa is a 40-acre site in the Barossa Valley; we serve as a crush and bottling plant for our Southcorp vineyards of Kalimna, Eden Valley, The Waltons and Seppeltsfield.”
“Krone is virtually the industry standard for structured cabling solutions which is important to us because our organisation is widespread,” Martin continued.
“Krone is also a local manufacturer which is important when it comes to surety of supply.”