Nicolas Feuillatte secures his backups with Rubrik

A wine-growing center created in 1972, Nicolas Feuillatte produces more than 10 million bottles of champagne per year, a large part of which is marketed internationally. The cooperative structure uses more than 80 different software programs to cover the classic missions of a company (CRM, ERP, HR, office automation) as well as the specificities of its profession, from the management of the vat room to the keeping of cellar registers. For its production, it relies on a 98% virtualized environment, with a hundred virtual machines. Hosting is provided internally in two remote data centers, to allow continuity and disaster recovery. Six people work in the information systems department, including two in infrastructure management. In this context, the team attaches particular importance to the effectiveness of management solutions.

The existing backup solution, implemented in 2012, did not meet these expectations. Unfinished, it required two years of updates before being stabilized. Moreover, it did not offer the necessary scalability to support the growing needs of the wine center. Each evolution led to considerable loss of time, linked in particular to the fact that each component of the solution had to be adapted separately: the hardware (CPU, RAM, storage bays), the version of the backup software, not to mention the operating system. . Faced with a new load increase, which was difficult to achieve due to hardware constraints, the company decided to change its backup solution in 2017.

10 hours saved per month on backup tasks

Through his integrator partner Acteab, Nicolas Feuillatte discovered Rubrik’s appliances. A demonstration carried out by the supplier completes the convincing of the company, which particularly appreciates the Instant Recovery function. “It now allows us to reassemble a VM in one minute, where previously we needed one to two hours, sometimes even more,” explains Bastien Lamoureux, micro-computing and network manager at Nicolas Feuillatte. In 2017, the structure adopted two first chassis of three nodes, since enriched by two additional nodes in a third R6404 chassis to manage the twenty terabytes of data from its information system. “Scaling up is really very simple: just add nodes. The licensing model is also more transparent and simple, with a license for one node, with no extra charge for each option or addition of functionality,” underlines Bastien Lamoureux.

The solution has saved valuable time on administration, reducing the time spent managing backups by 10 hours per month. A very simple interface allows you to define preferences, such as the information retention period, the windows and the frequency of backups. “Rubrik is then responsible for applying the backup policy to all machines,” says Bastien Lamoureux. Another advantage of these appliances is that they use a different operating system from that deployed on the rest of the infrastructure, reinforcing the protection of company data against ransomware. “In the event of an attack, the risk of having your backup also encrypted is reduced”, specifies Bastien Lamoureux. This also underlines the responsiveness of the support and the efficiency of the search engine, “so powerful and efficient that we no longer use the Windows engine to search for a file lost by a user”.