Star Kay White's PowerStore Decision | xByte Technologies OnPrem Pros

In this episode, your hosts Ryan Brown, Tyler Young, and Josh Moss from xByte Technologies sit down with Mikko Peltoniemi, Director of IT at Star Kay White, a leading manufacturer of ice cream flavoring ingredients. They dive into Mikko's data center modernization journey, the challenges of transitioning away from Storage Spaces Direct, and the decision to partner with xByte to implement a Dell PowerStore-based solution focused on high availability and redundancy.

Key Points
• Mikko shares the evolution of Star Kay White's IT from a server room in a breakroom to a resilient, modern infrastructure.
• Rising hardware and licensing costs forced a reevaluation of their architecture and a switch from Dell direct to a partner-led approach.
• Redundancy was the top priority, driving the choice to deploy dual Dell PowerStore arrays across separate buildings.
• The xByte team provided a white-glove, consultative experience, helping Mikko navigate technical and organizational transitions.
• Hands-on implementation enabled Star Kay White's IT team to gain critical knowledge while going live over a single holiday weekend.

Star Kay White's Director of IT Mikko Peltoniemi shares how the company grew from a single-server room to a multi-building, redundant infrastructure powered by Dell PowerStore.
• The original server sat next to a sink in the breakroom — today, they run a split-cluster across two sites.
• Mikko emphasizes IT's quiet role in food safety and compliance, especially given their scale in the ice cream industry.
• Storage, compute, and reliability were all vital, but redundancy was the ultimate goal.
• Downtime could mean discarding entire food batches, so uptime is non-negotiable.
• Growth in employees and facilities made the old architecture unsustainable.

xByte helped design and implement a solution focused on real-world constraints and future needs.
• Redundancy was achieved via two PowerStore arrays and stretched clustering across buildings.
• The CCTV system required GPU support on each node, influencing hardware specs.
• Mikko appreciated Dell/xByte collaboration to validate Windows Server 2025 metro volumes.
• Trusted partner access to Dell's experts was crucial for validating edge-case requirements.

Mikko opted to have xByte handle the full implementation and training of his IT staff.
• Delegating the install freed Mikko to focus on strategic planning.
• His junior IT staff shadowed the install team to gain practical experience.
• Implementation was done from cardboard box to live cluster in just three days.
• He values avoiding “two-month shelf time” delays that come with DIY rollouts.
• This was a shift in leadership style—hands-off execution, hands-on learning.