Actu
Cogedim turns to syncsort bex to optimize and centralize Backup Operations
April 2011 by Marc Jacob
Based in Paris and operating throughout France, COGEDIM – a member of the ALTAREA COGEDIM Group – develops residential and commercial real estate, offering newly built or renovated residential properties as well as corporate properties such as hotels, logistics platforms, office buildings, retail outlets, and tourist residences. The company oversees a retail property portfolio of more than 650,000 square meters of gross leasable area with a net value of €2.4 billion. An additional 2 million+ square meters of net floor space are under development, making the company an industry leader.
As the company continues to prosper, it has opened and staffed offices in multiple locations across the country. To properly support that growth, COGEDIM recently initiated a large-scale IT transformation that included a complete overhaul of its IT infrastructure. Chief among the challenges it faced: effectively centralizing the data backups that were previously divided among its eight separate sites – seven of which were remote regional locations that had no local IT support. What’s more, COGEDIM sought to deploy backups using both tape and disk media.
That’s when the company turned to BEX from Syncsort, the leaders in IT solutions that accelerate data processing, integration, and backup/recovery with more than 40 years’ experience in managing data flows. Syncsort was chosen for its solutions that combine extreme performance, optimized hardware utilization, and easy deployment.
Syncsort BEX delivers the industry’s fastest, most resource-efficient data backup solution with instant recovery ? from a single management console. BEX shrinks backup times by 90 percent and cuts recovery times from hours to minutes. Designed for easier management with minimal hardware expenditures, BEX drives operational costs down while providing far better protection.
According to Franck Laudet, IT director for COGEDIM, BEX implementation was simple and straightforward. “It only took our global IT service provider’s three-person team – supported by a Syncsort expert – a few days to implement the solution,” he said.
From day-one, COGEDIM noticed significantly faster recovery times and far fewer hours spent managing backups for the regional sites. “We were able to reallocate our IT staff to higher-value end-user service and support tasks,” Laudet said. Moving forward, COGEDIM plans to implement ROI indicators for time saved managing data protection, use data replication mechanisms to manage the backup site, and make the move to a more virtualized IT environment.
“BEX was ideal for our environment and we’re delighted with the solution,” he added. “It provides superior performance for managing backups to both tape and disk – which was a key requirement for us. We can perform centralized block-level backups – without needing any IT support at the local offices. And BEX also has the functionality to support our forthcoming virtual IT environments. BEX was easy to deploy, scalable, and very manageable.”
COGEDIM
Industry
• Real Estate
Challenge
• Complete an entire overhaul of IT infrastructure
• Centralize backup operations previously split among eight sites (including seven remote regional offices
• No local IT support in regional offices
• Backups needed on tape and disk
Solution
• Syncsort BEX for centralized data backup
• NetApp storage array as backup target
• Centralized administration through easy graphical interface
• Excellent scalability
Business Value
• Fast and easy to implement
• Significantly faster recovery times
• Increased IT productivity
• Greater user satisfaction
