Grand Frais secures its backups and controls its costs with Leviia Storag3
As part of an infrastructure overhaul, Grand Frais was looking to move its backups off-site, simply and quickly.
Grand Frais is a French food retail chain specializing in fresh products, with 350 stores nationwide. Its infrastructure and security team manages a hundred servers and brings support to 1,000 users approx.
The mission
While rebuilding their IS, the Grand Frais IT team relocated their servers to French data centers and deployed a hyperconverged environment with a backup solution. This raised the question of where to store off-site backups within the new architecture.
The solution had to meet four requirements:
- Move backups off-site without investing in dedicated storage arrays at a third location.
- Find a cost-effective solution without diminishing performance.
- Eliminate exit fees charged by some cloud providers during restoration.
- Keeping hosting in France, under French jurisdiction, with data sovereignty as a top priority.
Why Grand Frais trusted Leviia
“The truly decisive factor was having no exit costs on restoration. With Azure or AWS, once you take those fees into account, their solution becomes far less competitive.”
The team’s first instinct was to work with a well-known solution, Azure Blob Storage. After weighing costs against sovereignty requirements, Leviia emerged as the best option meeting their goals.
Several factors reinforced this choice:
- Clear pricing model: with Leviia, restoration operations come at no extra cost. The service is billed based on storage capacity, with no additional charges for outbound data. This model provides a level of budget-predictability that hyperscaler solutions simply do not match.
- Sovereignty and French hosting: data is hosted in France and operated by a company under French jurisdiction. The geographic proximity of backup sites is also an advantage for DRP.
- Easy-to-use: the Leviia dashboard is easy to use from day one, with no prior training needed. It provides a single-screen interface with created credentials, buckets, stored volumes and configured thresholds. Quotas and access authorizations can be modified whenever needed, providing the team with a precise control over storage.
- Native integration: Leviia S3 object storage runs on the standard S3 API, allowing immediate integration with Grand Frais’s existing backup tool.
Implementation and results
“We created our credentials, configured our buckets, set the parameters, and within 10 minutes, backups were running.”
As soon as they subscribed, the team accessed the Leviia dashboard via a link sent by email. Setting up credentials, configuring buckets and defining quotas took just a few minutes. Data flows were opened and the first backups ran right away.
Managing quotas by credential allows the team to organize backups by category, to create as many buckets as needed, and to add-up available throughputs when running simultaneous jobs.
Benefits observed
- Fast transfers and solid backup performance from day one in production.
- Credential and bucket configuration freely adapted to the team’s structure and needs.
- Predictable, controlled costs: no exit fees, no hidden fees for restoration.
Would you recommend Leviia?
“Without hesitation. The solution works well and the whole experience has been very positive since it has been implemented. We have already increased our storage volume and recommended Leviia to our partners. That’s the best signal we can give.”
Fabien Gougoux, Head of IT & Infrastructure Security, Grand Frais