Benoit Perrussel, Honda France Manufacturing: EMC Selected to Help Transform Data Protection

August 30, 2010

Honda France Manufacturing has redesigned its data protection infrastructure, leveraging EMC and VMware solutions deployed in combination with EMC Avamar deduplication backup and recovery software. By protecting its virtualized server environment with Avamar, the Orleans, France-based manufacturer has achieved a broad spectrum of efficiencies and can now rapidly and reliably recover both its data and systems.

As one of Europe's leading manufacturers of power products, Honda France Manufacturing assembles over two hundred thousand goods per year for distribution throughout the European market. In an increasingly competitive market, they rely heavily on their IT systems to successfully drive their highly streamlined "just-in-time" manufacturing processes, as well as all associated operational, financial and administrative functions. Several years ago, the company began a comprehensive project to upgrade its IT systems that included EMC and VMware solutions. But their existing backup system, which consisted of tape infrastructure and Symantec NetBackup, was not keeping pace.

"Our legacy backup process was incredibly slow," said Benoit Perrussel, systems network manager for Honda France Manufacturing. "Just backing up the data held on the file server could take twelve hours. With that kind of performance, we were only able to complete a full system backup once a week. We needed to make a change and began a search for a new solution."

Today, Honda France Manufacturing's high performance data protection infrastructure is a model of excellence that closely mirrors its own commitment to quality in manufacturing. "With EMC Avamar, the same file server that used to take twelve hours to backup now takes just one hour to backup," says Perrussel. "In addition, Avamar's VMware protection capabilities are truly exceptional."

Perrussel also cites excellent recovery speeds, reduced management and administration time, the ability to reliably perform full backups every day, and cost savings due to reduced storage capacity requirements as additional advantages gained with Avamar. "I can recommend EMC Avamar because Honda France Manufacturing has received outstanding benefits and found the product extremely easy to implement and use," notes Perrussel. "With EMC's help, our redesigned data protection system is light years ahead of our legacy system, and we're comfortable that our systems, applications and data are protected and easily restorable in virtually any circumstance."