Medria

Based in Brittany, France, Medria Technologies designs, produces, and markets sensors and IT solutions for monitoring livestock. Medria performs real-time analysis of up to 300,000 animals based on 500,000 metrics that are collected every 30 minutes. Sensors are inserted inside the animals, and farmers are notified via SMS alerts about health-related scenarios such as dietary problems, changes in body temperature, or imminent calving.

Medria’s business requires a highly available and secure infrastructure that clients can access 24/7. In the event of a livestock emergency, such as an illness or pending birth, the farmer’s awareness of the situation is the first step in providing effective treatment.

Medria requires reliable long-term data storage to enable future industry trend analysis with both backward and forward data review. And because a connected farm operation relies on the evolving technology of the Internet of Things, Medria was seeking greater administrative efficiencies to enable its team to better focus on product development.

“I believe we are the first company to introduce this technology channel, ranging from the physical measurements of animals to the provision of digital services to farmers. This is clearly a digital transition.”

Jean-Pierre Lemonnier, President, Medria Technologies

OVH Dedicated Servers are organised into different levels based on functionality that promotes scalability:

The first-level server manages routing to ensure the animal metrics are properly stored.

The second-level server houses 12 TB databases.

The third-level server contains virtual machines that run proprietary software for data processing.

The fourth-level server runs additional proprietary software and manages the sending of SMS texts.

In addition, a virtual server monitors the entire infrastructure to detect failures and transfer services to a backup server, one of which is dedicated to each level. Additional servers can easily be added where and when needed, and all servers are connected with vRack, for highly secure private network functionality.

“Externalising our infrastructure with a provider such as OVH has allowed us to benefit from added security (at the) network level and at the power source.”

Stéphane Godin, Software Development Manager, Medria Technologies

OVH’s solution provided Medria with a secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure that is almost entirely isolated from the public network. More than 4,500 farms access the infrastructure to understand animal behaviour, and Medria provides value by helping farmers boost the efficiency of their livestock care and management.

In the future, Medria hopes to optimise its big data capabilities by optimising access time to data, which would enable faster and greater scalability. Medria is also considering the addition of physical machines to the cluster within vRack to improve the robustness of the infrastructure. Medria may also take advantage of OVH’s turnkey software-as-a-service platform to boost operational efficiencies.