Clauger achieves over 25% TCO savings, consolidates data management

The Challenge

To protect and store its data, Clauger initially used three complementary solutions in order to ensure the overall global management of Clauger data backups. While these solutions were then suited to Clauger’s needs, the division of storage into three different parts was still a challenge.

Yet to remain at the forefront of innovation and keep pace with the company’s growth, Clauger embarked on a modernisation process for its data storage. On the advice of Constellation, its IT partner for many years, Clauger contacted Cohesity, and after evaluating nearly ten solutions, chose Cohesity for comprehensive data management.

For Clauger, the reasons for bringing in Cohesity are twofold: to respond to problems frequently encountered in recent years and to achieve concrete objectives, including saving time on backup, ensuring better and more secure data, and increasing the duration of data retained.

“We were looking for a global solution, allowing us to reduce our number of suppliers. Cohesity had the advantage of being able to meet this expectation by offering us a single solution to replace three existing ones,” says Boute. “The implementation was very easy. Cohesity was able to offer us a smooth migration with unrivaled ease of implementation.” The move to Cohesity was completed very quickly, in just one month.

The Solution

Clauger initially adopted Cohesity DataProtect for data management and disaster recovery in 2019. The implementation immediately resulted in better, simpler, and faster recovery and backup. That enabled Clauger to then solve three additional challenges: cost reduction through fewer service providers, simplified data management processes with a single platform that met technical objectives, and access to and easier management of more data. Now, the company is entering its final implementation phase by expanding Cohesity to protect workloads in the cloud.

Today, Clauger has complete data management with the Cohesity solution providing unequaled ease of use to its customers. For example, with Cohesity SmartFiles it is simple to tier a file to Cohesity while leaving a shortcut in the place of the file. For the user, nothing changes, the file remains visible and accessible. The only difference is that the shortcut will now point to Cohesity. A more transparent solution for Clauger’s customers, Cohesity did not introduce any disruption while delivering the benefit of an improved data restoration service. “This is a real time saver and provides a better quality of customer service,” says Boute.

The Cohesity data management solution also provides increased data capacity, which allows the company to limit the size of primary storage, a major asset for Clauger, which has experienced a doubling in data volume in just three years.

The Results

Faster backup and recovery time is undoubtedly one of the major advantages of the Cohesity solution. “Previously, we had to juggle between several solutions and we could take 15 to 30 minutes to recover a file,” says Boute. “Now, Cohesity’s indexed system allows us to search almost instantly. We just have to type the name of the file and find all those with the same name. This is a comfort to our customers, and also to the employees that use the solution.”

By cutting backup time in half, Clauger can now reliably back up and restore its data.

Ease of use and time savings also result from the simplified management of the Cohesity solution. The web-based user interface and the indexing principle are sufficiently comprehensible for all IT employees to use the solution versus requiring product specialists. In addition, the deduplication and data compression system is particularly well developed in Cohesity.

Finally, to respond better to the increasing evolution of its data, Clauger benefits from the scalability of the Cohesity solution, particularly with respect to data capacity, which is incremental and limitless. Should more capacity be required, additional nodes can easily be added to an existing cluster.

“Our estimation is that our spending is 25% lower with Cohesity. And the savings are much greater, considering that legacy products come with many hidden costs to be taken into account: daily administration time, monitoring of the solution, and, of course, data recovery time,“ said Boute. If previously the time required for research and validation of information was particularly long, today the readability of the state of Cohesity backups makes it possible to be much faster. As Cohesity supports massive scale, it’s also possible to both collect more data on an ongoing basis and retain it for longer periods of time.

Finally, the Cohesity solution brings Clauger peace of mind with respect to change management and the overall evolution of the company. While the company has increased the number of employees by nearly 50% during the past two years, Cohesity has allowed it to seamlessly double its primary storage capacity and encouraged increased daily use of the change management system, resulting in considerable improvement in the quality of customer relationships.