Let’s talk big data and precision agriculture in this week’s program. Listen in on a conversation I just had with Bill Barton, Principal, XS, Inc. and Timothy P. Carroll, Sr. Network Engineer. XS, Inc. just announced a major upgrade to their storage area network (SAN) infrastructure.

As a drought in the Midwest raises food prices, farming efficiency and getting the most from farm lands has become more essential than ever. XS, Inc is known in the food and agriculture industry for its ability to provide internet-based applications to help its agricultural clients drive efficiency and business value within their own organizations. To keep those online applications up and running, XS, Inc. selected Dell Compellent storage arrays, PowerEdge servers, PowerVault disk storage, and Latitude laptops. Since XS, Inc. moved to Dell Compellent this year, the company has maintained 99.999 percent storage availability to support the company’s rapid growth

This move comes in a timely fashion to support a new service offering, AgVeritas software.

XS, Inc. is the first agricultural SaaS provider with commercially accessible spatial statistics software, AgVeritasTM, transforming a traditionally expensive and time-consuming process to a highly available solution for agricultural clients. AgVeritas analyzes soil variability, elevation, drainage and the amount of sunlight and provides customers with the information they need to effectively manage their field. The company also collects more point of sale transaction data than any other service provider, providing its largely agricultural customers with insight and analytics to make educated business decisions on where and what to plant to optimize available farm land. The Dell infrastructure is critical to supporting XS, Inc.’s big data applications due to its flexibility and reliability.

So, what does all this mean? That’s what we talk about in this week’s ZimmCast. Today’s farmer has a real need for comprehensive information right now, right where he is, so he can make important farm management decisions. I was very intrigued by the idea of “spatial statistics” and Tim explains that in our conversation. From my perspective AgVeritas is once again showing the XS, Inc. is ahead of the curve. AgVeritas is currently in field trials and should be ready for prime time by first quarter 2013.

BTW. ZimmComm is about to go through a major upgrade of all our behind the scenes infrastructure which should be complete by mid November.

Listen to this week’s ZimmCast here: XS, Inc. & AgVeritas

Watch a video about AgVeritas:

Thanks to our ZimmCast sponsors, GROWMARK, locally owned, globally strong and Monsanto, Roundup Ready Plus, for their support.

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