Retailer Stokomani Chooses Huawei's OceanProtect Solution to Build Reliable and Efficient Digital Infrastructure

In 2022, Stokomani recognized that both its data storage and backup system had reached capacity and performance limits. So, the retailer issued a tender to find a new solution that would address its needs for resilience, security, and simplified management. Komposite, a data management specialist and Huawei partner, successfully won the bid, proposing the OceanProtect Backup Storage Solution, combining its own expertise in data management with this advanced Huawei storage platform.

Facing System Challenges

With Stokomani ramping up its digitalization activities, it faced dual challenges. It had to implement stricter protection for its ever-growing database as well as establish an effective Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, to increase the company's resilience in the event of a cyberattack.

"Our first issue was to meet data archiving challenges, as well as data restoration throughput capacity," explained Mathieu Bienvenu, the company's Technical Director. "We were equipped with cabinets that didn't allow us to meet the backup and archiving policy, and the backup policy we needed was to achieve data retention of 30 days, 12 months, and even 3 years.

"Now that we have implemented Huawei OceanProtect cabinets to manage all the backup and archiving," Bienvenu added, "we are more confident and reassured about the capacity and performance of our Information System (IS) to restore our data."

"A DR plan is one of the priorities of our strategy," further explained David Dutendas, Stokomani's Chief Information Officer. "In the event of a cyberattack or a natural disaster, we need to be able to make our applications available to our business very quickly, to make them operational again."

Stokomani's requirements spanned the design and implementation of a backup solution, which needed to be compatible with its existing solution and environment. The company was also looking to simplify maintenance.

Huawei OceanProtect Offers Superb Resilience and Security

Huawei's OceanProtect Backup Storage delivers comprehensive data protection. Its rapid DR and backup ensures zero service disruption or data loss, alongside long-term information retention.

One OceanProtect system was deployed as Stokomani's primary storage unit then paired with a secondary OceanProtect unit for remote replication. After integration with the company's original backup solution, backups are stored securely in the primary node and synchronized to the secondary, enabling fast data recovery from either storage unit — on demand. The solution offers deduplication and compression features to more efficiently use storage and bandwidth, providing a resilient and scalable DR system.

"Huawei OceanProtect cabinets have, within the Operating System (OS), an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Powered Ransomware Protection Solution," explained Sofiène Khaldi, a Huawei France Account Director. "By AI-powered, we mean the capability to detect an attack in progress or identify a potential attack. We can also take a snapshot, a copy of the data, which is immutable. So, it can't be altered or modified."

Superior Performance with 50% Faster DR

The Huawei solution has provided Stokomani with a reliable, streamlined data foundation, boasting both stability and efficiency.

Stokomani originally wanted its first storage cabinet to be capable of storing 30 days of production data, with the second cabinet deployed for archiving. However, Huawei was able to exceed expectations, delivering much longer data retention and higher performance.

Alex Gavel, Stokomani's Systems Administrator, said: "The strength of OceanProtect storage arrays is the speed of recovery from an attack. The high-performance system's Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have a latency of less than a millisecond."

This time advantage means that OceanProtect provides a robust guarantee for Stokomani's business continuity. Dutendas explained: "Compared to other solutions, where data recovery requires six hours, Huawei's solution only requires three." Indeed, OceanProtect cuts data recovery times by half.

Excellence in Support

What struck the Stokomani team was how efficient Huawei was when responding to requests, be it for technical support or more general inquiries. "Huawei is very responsive to answer all our questions," Gavel noted, "and they were able to do the network architecture in three, four hours remotely. We know we can count on them at any time."