In Scientific Instrumentation, Leosphere France Speeds Up Backups and Improves System Availability

Arcserve, LLC announced that Leosphere France, in ground-based and turbine-mounted Lidars (light detection and ranging) for atmospheric observation, has deployed a solution integrating Arcserve and Nimble Storage technology to reduce backup times and improve system availability.

Arcserve’s Unified Data Protection (UDP) Appliance is integrated with the Nimble Storage Predictive Cloud platform. Leosphere has implemented both the UDP appliance and a Nimble Adaptive Flash Array to offer a data protection solution, thanks to automatic storage snapshots. This integrated Arcserve backup and Nimble storage solution has increased backup and recovery processing speeds by 30%.

Founded in 2004, Leosphere designs and markets Lidars, atmospheric remote-sensing instruments which allow wind measurement, aerosol characterisation and localisation, clouds height and atmospheric structure. With more than 900 Lidars currently in service in over 50 countries, the company develops and manufactures all its systems in France. In the last 10 years, it has followed major international growth and expansion. For its backup, the company had a half-manual, half-automated system relying on HDDs attached to the servers.

The system was no longer suitable to the company’s needs according to Rudy Maron, CIO at Leosphere, who explains that: “Leosphere’s legacy backup solution had become obsolete and was time-consuming to manage and expensive to maintain.“

Leosphere decided to migrate to a virtualised infrastructure, currently supported by 12 physical servers. This infrastructure hosts part of Leosphere’s information systems, including the intranet site and file servers. The company called on its IT partner, Cap Antigone, to define, supply and implement the new infrastructure. The plan was also to replace Leosphere’s nearly saturated storage environment, as well as assess and select a secure, automated backup solution for superior performance.

Cap Antigone worked alongside Arcserve and Nimble to define, test and implement a backup and storage set up that perfectly met Leosphere’s requirements and satisfied three key objectives:

• Supported virtualization of the architecture
• Enhanced performance
• Ensured secure backups

Using a series of workshops and tests, the companies demonstrated an approach for backing up and storing Leosphere’s data.

UDP completes a backup every hour for the critical servers and once a day for all servers while utilising the snapshots taken by the Adaptive Flash array. By using the array for backups, the hypervisors are free to manage all the servers, increasing system availability even when the backup process is in full flow. Backups are performed automatically based on predefined settings that vary according to each server, and since all backup processes are automated, the company’s IT team spends less time on administrative tasks and focuses on improving IT service performance.

“Integrating Arcserve and Nimble Storage solutions has reduced backup times and improved system availability,” said Maron. “Only a few clicks are needed to obtain an overview of all the backup processes and schedules across our architecture.“

With UDP, Leosphere no longer needs to carry out full backups each time, as the data protection solution continuously performs incremental backups, reducing the overall storage footprint.

“Data deduplication ensures fast backup times and reduces the amount of required storage, which will help us avoid spending time on additional IT hardware for the coming three years,” Maron explains.

Most importantly, the storage solution can be scaled to support Leosphere’s future growth. The company can add virtual servers and deliver new services to users and customers without needing additional hardware for the backup solution. Increasing system and data availability will stimulate a higher productivity as the storage solution and the infrastructure deliver greater flexibility and scalability.

Consequently, UDP will enable Leosphere to:

• Free up time within the IT team
• Improve IT productivity
• Support its growth