Global Leader In Sports Gear And Equipment, Decathlon, Teams With Datadobi To Carry Cloud Data Migration Across The Finish Line

DobiMigrate Meets Complex and Demanding Requirements – Compliantly Migrating Heterogeneous Archive Data into the Cloud

Background

In 1976, Michel Leclercq and a small team of sports lovers embarked on an adventure: to bring quality, affordable sports gear, and equipment under one roof. Their goal? To make sports more accessible to everyone. Since its first store in Lille, France, Decathlon has grown into a global leader and innovator in sports gear, launching its first originally designed products in 1986. Driven by innovation and passion for sports, Decathlon has won over sports enthusiasts around the world. Today, Decathlon has 93,000 employees, and over 1,600 stores, in more than 69 countries.

Its products are the result of passion, extensive testing, and the relentless pursuit of affordability while ensuring sustainable practices that protect the environment we love. Decathlon knows sports are better when shared. These are core principles not only applied to its products, but to the data and IT infrastructure that serves as the backbone of the entirety of its business endeavors.

The Challenge

To support the company’s tremendous growth and success, Decathlon decided to completely leave its on-site data centers and migrate to a number of the main cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, Yandex, and others). One of the final steps would be one of its most critical on its trek toward a successful digital transformation -- the migration of all its on-premises unstructured archive data, ranging from product and inventory to customer data.

“We knew a migration of this magnitude could be very complicated, particularly in relation to moving the archive data,” said Tony Devert, IS Engineer, Decathlon. “We considered using CSP’s data movement capabilities but knew this wasn’t their core competency and that their tools were not really qualified to conserve our legal timestamp.” He explained, “We had over six years of archive data to move to the cloud. Every application has its own particularity and would have needed to do its own migration. In other words, the project would have been chopped up into little pieces individually by application. In addition, we had the added complication that the archives included legal data that had associated required retention periods. So, we needed to have extra checks and safety measures in place that would provide proof of the correct migration of the content.”

“We then explored two solutions. The first was an in-house developed data migration tool. The second was migration through the application, which was already in use for other purposes by some of our internal users. We tried them both out on small sets of data and found that the transfers were slow -- much too slow for such a massive migration that would meet our migration timeline objectives.”

The Solution

After careful research and a successful POC, Decathlon chose to deploy DobiMigrate as it found it to be the ideal solution for meeting its complex and demanding requirements. This included maintaining data integrity, in addition to providing chain of custody via its hashing of every single file as it is migrated. With DobiMigrate, a file would only be declared successfully migrated if the source and target were an identical match. A report could then be created to show every single hash of every single file, which could be kept for future auditing.

“With DobiMigrate, we were able to dramatically accelerate our migration and complete it well under our timeline objective,” said Devert. “And, with its chain of custody capabilities, we don’t have to check and double-check that our data was moved to the destination. With DobiMigrate, if we are audited in two years, five years, or 10 years we can be confident our data is there, and it is correct.”

When asked about ROI, Devert explained, “The first ROI benefit was in that we went from having 15 people to just one having to manage the migration. The next major ROI benefit was that we had a deadline by which we wanted to close our data center. But we couldn’t do that until our data was safely moved to our new cloud environment. Without DobiMigrate our project would have been significantly delayed by months. Having to keep that data center open for an extended time would have been very expensive from a capital and operational perspective. We estimate that from this standpoint we saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

He continued. “And perhaps most importantly, now that we are in our new cloud environment we can benefit from the speed, agility, and elasticity of on-demand solutions that we can intelligently adapt to our business requirements, thereby positively impacting our bottom-line.” 

Devert concluded, “In addition to DobiMigrate exceeding our expectations, I was delighted with the superior level of responsiveness I received from the entire Datadobi team. Even when I had a question or concern during the migration that had nothing to do with their product, their experts were able to answer my questions and help guide me to resolution, saving me a tremendous amount of time and effort.”

With its IT infrastructure now deployed 100% across public clouds, Decathlon’s training, recruitment, and partnership with technology visionaries and experts has become a key strategic priority. Its goal is to continue to leverage the newest and most innovative technologies in areas such as serverless applications, automation, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) such as Terraform, Git, Kubernetes, and the like.

About Datadobi

Datadobi, a global leader in data management software, brings order to heterogeneous unstructured storage environments in the cloud and the data center so that the enterprise can realize the value of their expanding universe of data. Their software allows customers to migrate and protect data while discovering insights and putting them to work for their business. Datadobi takes the pain and risk out of unstructured data management and does it faster and more reliably than any other solution at the best economic cost point. Founded in 2010, Datadobi is a privately held company headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, with subsidiaries in New York, Melbourne, Dusseldorf, and London. For more information, visit www.datadobi.com, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.