Jacqueline Riu Opts for Synerway

Jacqueline Riu is a national and international retail outlet selling women’s clothes, shoes and accessories. 250 outlets, including 35 outside of France, sell eight million items to over one million clients.

"Before acquiring our first Synerway Backup Appliance, we backed up data using a commercial management server and LTO tapes. We also used XCopy to perform drive protection on a file server with a retention period of 24 hours. This situation lead us to make our initial purchase in 2007 of an LB900 Appliance", recalls Gilles Tostivint, IT Operations Manager.

With the arrival of new projects, the increasing number of servers and the need to perform system backups as well as hot database backups it became necessary to upgrade the solution. Last March, Jacqueline Riu acquired a resized Appliance to answer these new requirements: an LA16000 with 8 TB of RAID-5 disk (which can be upgraded to 13 TB) and LTO tape externalisation, providing an immediate and global view of all backed up systems.

"Our activity requires us to be on permanent call for our network of stores. We needed simple procedures for hot backups and to have quick access to rapidly identifiable data which leaves us free to concentrate on our core business", continues Gilles Tostivint.

Jacqueline Riu looked into the backup appliance market for a solution which could answer our specific IT protection needs: "Comparative studies clearly showed Synerway to offer both an economically competitive and an easy-to-use solution: an Appliance with an LTO library. These factors were key to our final decision. Other solutions under scrutiny appeared to be potentially risky or more difficult and complex to handle given our IT environment".

As with the first Appliance, Jacqueline Riu worked with Cap Synergy in Créteil, near Paris, a certified Synerway partner, responsible for integrating the LA16000, including migration and training: "Getting started was very straightforward. The interface and the creation of systems and profiles are very accessible which meant we were up and running very quickly".

Concerning restoration requests: "They are rare but when we receive one, data restoration is trouble-free. For backups, the procedures are fairly standard: daily incremental backups then weekly full backups and tape externalisations. Backups to disk have a two-week retention period and tape externalisations are kept for eight weeks".

"The next major step is the integration of the ‘UBMR’ (Universal Bare Metal Restore) disaster recovery solution which will protect us in the event of a crash", concludes Gilles Tostivint. "This solution fits seamlessly into the Synerway package and guarantees simple and rapid recovery after a major incident. One-stop data and system restoration integrates perfectly into our disaster recovery plan".