Headquartered in Villepinte, France, Petit Forestier is the European leader in refrigerated vehicle and container rental, providing key products for businesses whose success depends directly on controlled temperatures of their products and maintaining the continuity of the cold chain. The company has a portfolio of over 15,000 customers in diverse business sectors and more than 3,500 employees. With a network of 237 sites worldwide, Petit Forestier maintains an expansive fleet of more than 49,000 vehicles to serve its customers.

We recently spoke with Guillaume Laurency, CIO and Johan Barre, Project Manager, Infrastructure, about their experience with Rubirk.

Tell us about Petit Forestier’s IT strategy.
Laurency: As a family-owned company, we care deeply about our employees. We want to ensure they have a world-class experience by equipping them with modern IT solutions that will last for the next decade. We need infrastructure that will scale to support our company’s growth and transition to the cloud.

Rubrik is a true long-term partner for Petit Forestier, future-proofing our infrastructure as we develop their digital transformation and cloud strategy. Rubrik is more than just backup, providing us with greater use cases that can drive business objectives and deliver additional value to other teams.

What challenges were you previously experiencing with data management solutions?
Barre: We were frustrated with our previous backup configuration, a combination of a legacy solution and archival to tape. Our setup at the time had several issues and one of our largest pain points was backup performance. It often took 8 hours or more to complete backups. On top of that, it could take more than an hour to recover data.

What were you looking for in your new solution?
Barre: We were looking for a more reliable, stable and efficient solution that also fit into the company’s broader digital transformation strategy. We had recently transitioned our virtualized environment to Nutanix and knew our legacy backup solution would be unable to fully protect and manage it.

Our team liked Rubrik’s hypervisor-agnostic platform because it was the only solution on the market that provided a native and easy integration with Nutanix AHV. With Rubrik’s hypervisor-agnostic platform, we could easily implement Nutanix AHV without incurring additional costs. Rubrik allows us to utilize any cloud or hypervisor of our choice.

Why did you end up choosing Rubrik?
Barre: One of the biggest deciding factors was the simplicity of the solution. It only took an hour to train our team during the POC. We were also impressed with Rubrik’s world-class support team. They were available 24/7 and provided us with frequent updates.

What other benefits did you see from using Rubrik?
Barre: We saw many benefits from using Rubrik, including:

  • 5x faster backup performance: Our previous solution was unable to meet our defined backup windows and typically took 8 hours or longer. Rubrik’s performance has vastly exceeded our expectations.
  • Data archival to Google Cloud Platform: We were unable to set up public cloud with our previous solution. With Rubrik, we eliminated tape and integrated seamlessly with Google Cloud Platform. Together, Rubrik and Google Cloud Platform allow us to decrease costs and design a solution for long-term retention.
  • 80% management time savings: We used to spend 8 hours per month on backup, recovery, testing and tape rotation. With Rubrik, we only spend 1.5 hours per month.
  • Management simplicity across all apps: Rubrik provides us a single pane of glass to manage data across all our applications, including AHV virtual machines and NAS. With our previous solution, we needed multiple interfaces for one report.

Interested in learning more? Read the case study.