Medria’s New Technology for Cattle Tracking and Analysis
Medria’s New Technology for Cattle Tracking and Analysis
Medria: Robust IoT Infrastructure Enables the Monitoring of Livestock Operations 24/7
Comprehensive Data Boosts the Efficiencies of the Connected Farm
Based in Brittany, France, Medria Technologies designs, produces, and markets sensors and IT solutions for monitoring livestock.
Executive Summary
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.
Highlights
- 18 OVHcloud Dedicated Servers ensure the app’s high availability.
- 12 TB of data is collected, stored, and analyzed in the database.
- A robust processing power collects sensor data for real-time analysis that is communicated via SMS to farmers. Approximately 160 SMS are sent hourly (equating to up to 120,000 SMS alerts each month).
- A scalable infrastructure enables the business to grow and gain new customers.
Challenges
Medria’s business requires a highly available and secure infrastructure that clients can access 24/7/365. 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
Solution Delivered
OVHcloud Dedicated Servers are organized 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.
“Externalizing 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
Results, ROI, and Future Plans
OVHcloud’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 behavior, and Medria provides value by helping farmers boost the efficiency of their livestock care and management.
In the future, Medria hopes to optimize its big data capabilities by optimizing access time to data, which would enable faster and greater scalability. Media 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 OVHcloud’s turnkey software-as-a-service platform to boost operational efficiencies.