How Veeam helped grocery chain Franprix escape its backup hell
Backup at France-based meals retailer chain Franprix had grown right into a complicated mess. That’s when it made the change to Veeam Backup & Replication and smoothed issues out.
“We had duplicated backup systems that didn’t fit our IT any more,” mentioned Jérôme Chapelle, infrastructure supervisor at Franprix. “Our each day backups began each night at 10pm and went on till 2pm the subsequent day. If you wished to revive a file deleted in error throughout that point, you needed to anticipate the backup to complete. It actually put a block on issues.
“Added to that, the process generated numerous errors that we spent an incredible amount of time fixing. That meant our team of five could never get started on other projects.”
Franprix’s IT infrastructure includes a dozen bodily servers that run about 600 digital machines (VMs).
Modernisation to VMware was carried out, and after that, the double backup setup was put in place. Based on tape and designed for bodily servers, it offered quite a few constraints, together with the necessity to deduplicate information upstream or create digital machines to revive to.
“Backup is always the poor relation in IT,” mentioned Chapelle. “It doesn’t get the investment, but when it doesn’t work, it’s a disaster.”
Challenges of worth, scalability and efficiency
By 2018, the scenario had change into untenable and the choice was taken to search out an alternate. Without lots of time to check the options obtainable, Franprix selected from market chief Veeam and rising star Cohesity.
“Cohesity seemed very innovative, but was also quite expensive,” mentioned Chapelle. “And with our IT hosted in the datacentres of [parent group] Casino, Veeam presented a better financial opportunity because the Casino IT team also needed to invest in a new backup system. Consequently, Veeam allowed us to make a group purchase.”
Beside value, Franprix was extra all for Veeam from the beginning as a result of it introduced the promise of scalability and the power to proceed to perform, regardless of the {hardware} upstream of it. As it occurred, it functioned from the begin to again up digital assets from VMware vCenter.
The group had envisaged that, from 2018, it might improve to disk arrays able to taking snapshots, and that was what occurred when Franprix invested in Pure Storage {hardware} for its VMs.
But it was upon finishing up validation exams that one other metric gained over Chapelle’s workforce. “We were struck by the performance,” he mentioned. “The size of backup jobs was slashed by two or 3 times.
“The similar was true for restores, together with for those who concerned redeploying a whole practical copy of an software to emergency {hardware} within the case of an incident.
“Previously, this type of procedure – which we carried out regularly as part of recovery tests – took three days. With Veeam, there is an Instant Recovery function that allows redeployment of a system in a few minutes.”
Self-healing errors
Veeam Backup & Restore was lastly deployed firstly of 2019. The software program runs as one VM among the many others and takes care of 600 manufacturing VMs totalling 80TB.
Backups are run day-after-day, with Chapelle estimating 16TB of adjustments per day, and despatched to a Data Domain array the place they’re saved after deduplication. To date, there’s 23TB of backup information consolidated on the Data Domain.
“All backup jobs run at night and are completed when we arrive in the morning,” mentioned Chapelle.
“That said, errors still occurred during backups. Sometimes it was due to a Windows virtual machine that crashed during the process. Sometimes the Data Domain momentarily locked one of the user accounts that Veeam was trying to write backups for. We don’t really know why these things happened, but Veeam always detected them and automatically relaunched jobs until they succeeded. We don’t have to fix things ourselves now.”
He added: “The time that we have gained has allowed us, for example, to start work on the creation of automated processes that improve efficiency when responding to partners.”
Going past VM backup
Franprix has additionally invested within the Veeam ONE console to watch backups, though Chapelle makes use of it for greater than that in observe.
“In fact, Veeam ONE goes beyond just backups,” he mentioned. “It brings visibility into all assets within the virtualisation infrastructure.
“It warns us if things are not quite right, such as if 20GB of RAM is allocated to a VM when 4GB would do. It’s a very powerful tool. We use it a lot for capacity planning, to know how best to launch new projects with the resources we have.”
Finally, since 2021, Franprix has began to look into backing up information in cloud providers, particularly Microsoft 365 (Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and many others).
“We have found a supplier that hosts backups of these services in its own datacentre,” mentioned Chapelle. “The interesting point is that it allows us to restore data from these backups from the Veeam Backup & Replication console. It was exactly what we were expecting when we were looking for a backup solution that would stay compatible with the evolution of our IT systems.”
