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 fully manufactures all its systems in France. In the last 10 years, Leosphere has followed major international growth and expansion. For its data backup, the company had a half-manual, half-automated system relying on hard drives attached directly 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 Storage to define, test and implement a data backup and storage set up that perfectly met Leosphere’s requirements and satisfied three key objectives:
- Supported virtualization of the architecture
- Effectively enhanced performance
- Ensured secure backups
Using a series of workshops and tests, the companies demonstrated an especially effective approach for backing up and storing Leosphere’s data.
Today, Arcserve UDP completes a backup every hour for the critical servers and once a day for all servers while utilising the snapshots taken by the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash array. By using the array for backups, the hypervisors are completely 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 Arcserve 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 new infrastructure deliver greater flexibility and scalability. Consequently, Arcserve UDP will enable Leosphere to:
• Free up time within the IT team
• Improve IT productivity
• Support the company’s growth
