French Supermarket Franprix Chooses Veeam

The Franprix supermarket chain, part of the Casino group since 2007, consists of 880 local stores, the majority of which are located in large urban areas in France.

To support its business, it requires performance and reliability to ensure that stores are continuously supplied and open. They also require support for the e-commerce part of the business to maintain a consistently high level of customer satisfaction. Thus, the end user was looking for a backup solution that was both efficient and easy-to-use to replace its previous solution from Quest NetVault too rigid and unsuited to the way the company’s infrastructure had evolved. It also wanted to be able to regularly check the integrity and protection of its data in an agile manner to give its teams greater peace of mind.

Jérôme Chapelle, infrastructure manager, Franprix, oversees Windows Linux storage systems, virtualization and backup perimeters. Leading a deliberately small IT team, he was looking for an efficient and easy to administer backup solution to replace the old one, which had become obsolete and outdated in the face of his firm’s changing infrastructure.

 “Our backup strategy revolves around protecting our business-critical applications, but the strategy also covers our entire production systems,” he said. “What we expect from our backup solution is to be able to restore data as quickly as possible so as not to impact our business.“

As a local food retailer, Franprix is always pursuing continuity and quality of service with the help of its IT tools.

“During the proof of concept we conducted to select our new solution, Veeam Software, Inc. proved to be the perfect fit for us as a backup and recovery tool. Our requirements, which can be summed up as simplicity, robustness, efficiency and performance were met with Veeam. We were particularly impressed by its ease-of-use, which allowed us to design our tasks and execute them in a very simple manner. This could have been a major challenge for a small team like ours,” he said.

Regarding performance, he also added: “With our previous solution, we were wasting a lot of time with restarting jobs at the expense of other, higher value tasks. We wanted a more modern solution to reduce time-consuming daily backup operations for the good of our teams. Veeam makes backup more efficient and simplifies data recovery.“

To support Franprix’s almost entirely virtualized infrastructure, with a total data store of 250TB and 650 VMs, Chapelle was looking for a solution that was up to the challenge.

“We chose Veeam for its performance and ease of use, but also for its ability to back up physical servers,” Chapelle said. “Veeam’s replication functionality made the task of migrating several terabytes of data from our previous virtual infrastructure to the new one quick and easy.“

The results:

• Veeam’s ease of use and recovery speed supports Franprix’s business continuity objectives: It was chosen for its performance and ease-of-use in both virtualized and physical environments to put its outdated and complex solution behind them. Thanks to the features that complement Veeam Backup & Replication, Franprix benefits from near-instantaneous backups of its 250TB of data, without impact to production or end users. Its IT team has been able to save time with their daily backup execution, allowing them to spend more time on higher-value tasks and reduce costs.
• SureBackup guarantees backup integrity, allowing Franprix to keep peace of mind in the face of malicious cyber activity: Franprix is aware of the existence of cyber threats and uses SureBackup to reinforce its cybersecurity strategy. With SureBackup monitoring the integrity of the company’s backed up data, Franprix’s IT team can be confident in the quality of its backups and in their ability to quickly restore services in the event of an attack. Veeam ONE reporting also helped Franprix reinforce its security strategy by regularly checking the integrity and durability of their backups.
• Veeam’s integration with other market solutions provides additional strategic benefits to the IT team: The integrations between Veeam and other IT vendors were a key factor in Franprix’s decision to choose Pure Storage, Inc. The ease of integration and operation of the various infrastructure solutions reinforces Franprix’s overall IT strategy for more efficient data backup, thanks to the combined benefits of flash storage and Instant VM Recovery.

“Veeam has proven to be the perfect fit for us as a backup and recovery tool that fulfills our requirements, which can be summed up as: Simple, robust, efficient and high performing. We were particularly impressed by its ease of use, which allowed us to design our tasks and execute them in a very simple manner; this could have been a major challenge for a small team like ours,” concluded Chapelle.

Case study: Veeam helps Franprix guarantee data backup and protection for all its stores