National Library of Scotland

Ease of use, flexibility, scalability, durability and low TCO have justified multiple expansions and new workloads

Natixis is a French multinational financial services firm specialized in asset and wealth management, corporate and investment banking, insurance and payments. A subsidiary of Groupe BPCE — the second-largest banking group in France — Natixis counts nearly 16,000 employees across 38 countries. Its clients include corporations, financial institutions, sovereign and supranational organizations, and the customers of Groupe BPCE’s networks.

The amount of data that Natixis generates — and retains due to business needs and regulatory requirements — is massive. So massive, in fact, that the size of their backups was straining the RAID-based legacy storage system, which was also not meeting requirements for reliability and ease of operation. 

Being a geographically distributed organization, with likewise distributed data, Natixis needed more flexibility. As they evaluated their options for backup data storage, it quickly became apparent that it was time for a move to a scale-out storage architecture.

With plans to continue growing globally, Natixis sought a cost-effective storage solution for their backups that would also provide the high-durability their business demands, plus rapid data recovery and improved performance.

Natixis’ list of requirements led them to software-defined storage — and Scality. They were able to see that Scality RING was well-integrated and worked smoothly with their backup solution, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). The throughput also met their needs quite well — in fact, as much as 30% improvement in throughput was demonstrated as compared to their prior storage solution, resulting in a nice bump in performance of their backup and restore operations.

Scality’s extremely efficient durability model allowed Natixis to protect their 2PB of backup data without full replications on a small footprint of just 3.5PB of hardware, further adding to TCO savings.

It wasn’t long before their first expansion. In fact, Natixis has expanded their backup footprint, easily and seamlessly, multiple times. Their overall backup strategy has also evolved. They now store one week's backups via Rubrik to Scality RING, thanks to the great integration between Rubrik and Scality RING via S3. Longer term backups still use the IBM Spectrum Protect and Scality RING solution. The bottom line: Natixis is 100% invested with all company-wide backups secured on Scality RING.