Clauger is a French company that offers its expertise in climate engineering to industrialists around the world: solutions for heating, cooling, treatment and air filtration. A family company, Clauger has just under 3,000 employees, for around 300 million euros in annual turnover.
At the end of 2017, Clauger’s management had to face the facts: its backup infrastructure was coming to an end. The company then had three separate solutions: one for backing up files, another dedicated to servers and virtual machines and a final one responsible for archiving data.
“Processing times were getting so long that it was no longer possible to back up all of our servers overnight,” recalls Olivier Boute, IT manager at Clauger. A situation destined to worsen with the strong growth of the company’s activity, which translates into increased computing needs and therefore always more data to be backed up.
A unified on-premise backup solution
“We launched a call for tenders to renew our backup solution. Out of the ten responses received, Cohesity came up with a solution that interested us, but also questioned us, because it promised a lot of things. We then asked for the establishment of a PoC [preuve de concept, NDLR] to evaluate the solution. After a month, the conclusion is clear: this solution will be able to replace the three previously used.
The implementation of the solution was quick, despite a complex environment. Clauger is in fact spread over some sixty sites. The data is backed up on a first site, then replicated on a second, without the use of cloud infrastructure.
“We could have used the cloud, but given that we have several sites, solid IT infrastructures and that we can count on a good level of internet connectivity in France, we preferred to internalize the solution. Moreover, this choice is consistent with our purchasing policy, which favors the acquisition of assets rather than the hiring of services. For the same reasons, Clauger favored a transfer of skills allowing complete management of this IT solution internally.
More than a backup?
Clauger opted for a system capable of storing 240 TB of data. A solution that the company uses today at a third of its maximum capacity. This will allow you to choose to keep it longer, or to increase the retention period of certain data.
“This solution makes it possible to deduplicate and compress data much more efficiently than before,” observes Olivier Boute. “Backups are faster, as are data restore operations, which can be completed in less than ten minutes. This is all the more important since the IT department must restore information almost daily.
Next step ? “We are seriously considering removing our file servers to host everything directly in the Cohesity solution. A decision that would make sense, as this offer aims to go beyond the scope of backup to cover all the secondary storage needs of businesses.