Schneider Electric has led energy management and automation in homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and across a wide variety of industries.
The mission of their IT team was to innovate its backup and recovery infrastructure. The company had virtualized 90% of its environment. However, they were using a solution for backups that was not made for virtualization, creating a complex challenge.
A full backup took more than 40 hours. Tape backup storage and maintenance costs were more than $20K per year. They had more than 300TB of data, and a growth rate of 12% per year. Schneider needed to rapidly deploy a solution to eliminate these pain points.
The company knew it needed the following requirements:
- Move away from complexity to a cloud-based solution with simple administration and management.
- Achieve quick backup and restore operations.
- Migrate off legacy backup file storage and outdated distributed file structures completely.
- Determine a solution for data protection at remote sites.
Schneider had already begun to migrate to VMware for virtual workloads. They have more than 1,600 VMs worldwide. Schneider had Pure Storage in place for its primary tier one storage. Gartner directed the company to check out Cohesity and Rubrik. Rubrik was quickly ruled out due to the inability to do physical backups. Schneider chose Cohesity for the option of deploying both virtual and hardware form factors.
Schneider deployed Cohesity in North America first. They were up and running within 30 days. Now the company has expanded its implementation to Australia, Belgium, and Hungary to support its entire global backup and recovery operations. The power management leader has also streamlined and simplified operations, with faster recovery times and improved
backup snapshot frequency. The 40 hours it took for a backup previously is now down to just one hour.With the Cohesity deployment, it was easy for Schneider to seamlessly integrate Azure and Cohesity. Not only did Schneider save costs, the company also increased the value of long-term data retention and recovery in the cloud.
Microsoft Azure Blob storage uses encryption at rest and transfer and the company saw a reduction in backup footprint by 20 times.The IT team has freed up considerable resources to focus on strategic business operations instead of back office administration.Simplified and streamlined IT processes with built-in Pure and Microsoft integration, leaving legacy storage in the dust.
- Total environment is securely backed up at all six global data centers.
- Cost savings up to $60K per year.
- Significant reduction in data restores and recovery – from hours to minutes and days to hours.
“Cohesity has enabled us to shed the weight and challenges of our legacy backup environment and shift to a hybrid cloud solution, using a single Cohesity interface to manage all storage policies and our offsite backups in Azure. We have not only realized enormous cost savings, but have been supported by Cohesity every step of the way to achieve faster recovery times, improved backup snapshot frequency, and almost immediate data recovery.”– Gary Jackson, Global IT Leader, Energy & Sustainability Services
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