Photos: vignettes of the Chitale Dairy operation from tagged cows to cloud computing
Indian  milk products   leader Chitale Dairy, is a pioneer in embracing  IoT -- for automating its entire operational chain 
Mumbai, July 6 2015: Chitale Dairy sells around 60 million litres (15.9 million gallons) of milk annually from its own dairy farm and the small farms located near its facilities in Bhilawadi, Maharashtra state, India. Chitale Dairy has successfully redefined dairy farming into a high-tech industry by automating its entire milk production and monitoring processes. 
Increasing the yield has become a task powered by information. Vishvas Chitale, Director, Chitale Dairy, says, “We’ve transformed our dairy operations using technology, and the feeding and breeding of animals is now monitored by computers. By automating the collection of data from each farm, we have improved animal health, leading to increased milk yield per animal. We’ve also streamlined the efficiency of our distribution channels for faster delivery of our milk products to consumers.”
The company consolidated its two data centers eight years ago by implementing a Dell solution featuring Dell PowerEdge M910 blade servers with Intel Xeon E7-8867L series processors running VMware vSphere virtualization software, along with Dell Compellent and Dell EqualLogic storage. However, the company needed to upgrade its network to support the internal cloud used for the data management needs of Chitale Dairy’s research farm, the monitoring of logistical efficiency and factory energy consumption, and the storage and delivery of unique animal data.
Chitale has created a strong ecosystem of farmers and producers. Each animal is tagged with a radio-frequency identifi  tion (RFID) tag that, when scanned, transmits unique information on each cow and buffalo, back to the Chitale Dairy data centre. As a result, the speed and reliability of the network plays a critical role.
To produce around 500,000 litres of milk per day, as well as cheese, paneer (cottage cheese), cream, butter, yoghurt
and skimmed milk powder, the company runs operations 24/7. After considering several solutions the company migrated toDell Networking M8024-K 10-Gigabit Ethernet, S4810 10-Gigabit Ethernet and S55 1-Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rackswitches with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and fans. Being located 300 miles away from the city of Mumbai makes it more difficult to attract IT staff so Chitale Dairy relies on its automated, easy to manage infrastructure. 
Chitale Dairy now has a complete end-to-end ‘cows to cloud’ strategy in place. 
Our main story on Dell IoT here
Full  Connected Cow case study here