Fortifying Data Protection: France Symexo Enhances Backup Platform for Critical Customer Assets

As entering the digital age, enterprises are increasingly establishing data backup systems to prevent significant losses resulting from insecure of core service data. However, traditional backup systems often rely on general-purpose storage devices, which can lead to low backup performance, high capacity expansion costs, complex operations and maintenance, and low security. These limitations fail to meet the cost reduction and efficiency improvement requirements of modern enterprises. To address these challenges, Symexo, a French technology company, has chosen Huawei's OceanProtect dedicated backup storage solution to upgrade its backup system and efficiently protect its customers' core data assets.

Challenges in Backup System: Addressing Capacity, Performance, and Security Issues with Symexo

Symexo is a prominent IT company based in Balma, France, established in 2002. It is a leading Managed Service Provider (MSP) in the southern region of France, offering a wide range of services such as outsourcing, server monitoring and management, cloud services, and digital transformation. Symexo provides agile and personalized IT solutions to its customers. As an IT hosting service provider, Symexo handles a vast amount of critical customer data. Any loss of data can result in significant economic losses. To ensure data security and integrity, Symexo has implemented a data backup system using Veeam backup software and NAS storage devices. However, with the increasing volume of data due to digital transformation and cloud services, the existing backup system's capacity, performance, and security issues have become more prominent. Therefore, Symexo urgently requires a comprehensive upgrade and replacement of its backup system.

Symexo currently has six sets of 60 TB NAS backup storage devices, which are insufficient to meet the live network's backup requirements of 600 TB. If Symexo chooses to expand its capacity using the original solution, it would need to purchase at least five more devices, resulting in a total of twelve devices occupying a significant amount of rack space in the data center and consuming high power. This large space occupation and high-power consumption pose a challenge for Symexo's data center management.

The backup system in use by the company's live network is a NAS storage device that is not designed for professional backup purposes. As a result, the backup performance is suboptimal, with a full 40 TB data backup taking several hours to complete. This prolonged backup process occupies the production window, disrupting normal services and posing potential risks of data loss.

Furthermore, Symexo's complex O&M process demands significant time and manpower to manage backup devices and ensure optimal space and performance across multiple devices.

The backup storage currently lacks essential security features such as multi-factor authentication, secure snapshot, and secure data transmission protocols, leaving it vulnerable to ransom virus attacks. This weakness in security poses a significant risk to the company and its data. To address these issues, it is recommended that the company invest in a professional backup solution that is designed for enterprise-level backup needs. This will improve backup performance, reduce the risk of data loss, and enhance security features to protect against potential cyber threats.

With Huawei，Symexo has developed an efficient and reliable backup platform.

After conducting extensive research, Symexo has selected Huawei OceanProtect dedicated backup storage solution to meet their backup needs. The solution utilizes OceanProtect X6000 dedicated backup storage and VEEAM backup software to create a reliable and efficient backup platform, ensuring the protection of VMware VM cluster data. By replacing their existing backup media with OceanProtect X6000 dedicated backup storage, Symexo now has access to up to 1 PB capacity resources, which is sufficient to support their rapid service growth.

Symexo's backup solution is built on the dual-controller architecture of the OceanProtect X6000, with each controller managing two file systems. File systems FS01 and FS02 support secure snapshots and serve as the backup repository, while file systems FS03 and FS04 form the archive repository. The core production data is backed up to the backup repository on a daily basis, and then periodically replicated from the backup repository to the archive repository for long-term retention and archiving. Overall, Symexo's backup solution is highly efficient and reliable, providing them with the necessary backup protection to support their business growth.

OceanProtect offers higher performance and lower costs for Symexo's backup needs. With its efficient backup performance, the backup window is shortened from hours to minutes, greatly improving backup performance and ensuring service stability without impacting network performance. Additionally, a dedicated OceanProtect backup storage system replaces over a dozen devices on the live network, resulting in a data reduction rate five times higher than the previous solution. This saves over 30% backup data storage space and reduces the total cost of ownership by approximately 40%.

For enhanced security, the OceanProtect backup storage employs cutting-edge anti-ransomware technologies, including WORM file systems, secure snapshots, and end-to-end data encryption, to safeguard against data tampering and leakage and ensure the integrity and accessibility of backups. Additionally, the OceanProtect offers a user-friendly backup management interface, enabling Symexo to easily manage backup tasks and streamline operations.

The upgrade of the Symexo backup system has resulted in significant improvements in data backup efficiency, reduced data security risks, and cost savings in data protection investment. With the implementation of dedicated backup storage through OceanProtect, Symexo is now better equipped to provide professional technical services to its customers and establish itself as a trusted partner for an even wider range of clients.