French Children’s Fashion, Maternity and Childcare Group Orchestra Deploys Veeam

Orchestra SA, a French children’s fashion, maternity and childcare group, has implemented Veeam Backup and Replication, part of the Availability Suite, via its local partner Tech Data France SAS.

Orchestra has experienced strong growth since it was founded in 1995 and has a €650 million turnover and a network of more than 600 stores in 40 countries worldwide, while being focused on meeting the growing online needs of the modern consumer.

Following a big electrical storm in Montpellier, it suffered several power outages in short intervals at its HQs in the city. The consistent power failures prevented the IT team from resetting the system, and it was during this downtime that the company lost one of its servers which stored its ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software and over 4TB of data, out of the 130TB its production data represents.

While an unfortunate incident, it provided Orchestra with an opportunity to identify other vulnerabilities in its IT infrastructure, a result of aging storage server technologies and network infrastructure. The latter was particularly crucial due to the wide network of stores and logistics partners involved in firms’s sales operations. Data downtime would cause chaos to its supply chain and ability to sell to customers, so a decision was made to look for a data management partner to support its growing IT estate and increasing number of virtual servers.

Orchestra purchased Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 because its data management capabilities outperformed the competition across tasks such as data replication, continuity testing and fast data recovery of its existing VMware virtualised environment.

“Veeam was the obvious choice. It is a well-known, recognized and certified solution“, explained Stéphane Aubard, manager services infrastructure and IT operations, Orchestra. “We need to guarantee BC, both for our network of stores and online services. This is all the more important during peak shopping periods, where we experience higher levels of online traffic and ecommerce transactions. At these times, more than any other, our services need to be available to our customers, but also to our employees, whether they are located at our head office or in-store, and our partners that make our supply chain work.“

Backup and Replication has allowed Orchestra to achieve efficiency in the administration and security of its IT infrastructure and ensure BC. In addition, Veeam has delivered compression rates for backups, which in turn has reduced the size of a copy, meaning they can take more regular backups and reduce exposure to data loss. Orchestra also uses Veeam ONE for greater visibility of its data requirements and has gained valuable insights about the ROI of its virtual architecture.

Veeam’s real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities help the in-house IT team manage its infrastructure more proactively and detect issues before they have operational impact on the Orchestra network.

“The Veeam ONE solution is a first step towards the refined management of our VMs and the evolution of the system administration profession“, said Aubard.

All of Orchestra’s key workloads are being managed by Veeam across both physical and virtual architectures.

Patrick Rohrbasser, regional VP France and Africa, Veeam adds: “ Orchestra relies on data to deliver a reliable customer experience in store and online. In an increasingly competitive market, retailers need to better respond to customer expectations. We are delighted to be able to support Orchestra modernize its infrastructure management and focus on driving the digital transformation of the business.“