Tony Devert, IS Engineer, Decathlon, discusses why one of the world-leader’s in sports gear decided to migrate its data to the cloud, as well as offering some insight into how Datadobi’s DobiMigrate solution helped it to dramatically accelerate its migration process.
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 endeavours.
The challenge
To support the company’s tremendous growth and success, Decathlon made the decision to completely leave its onsite data centres 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 towards 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 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 Return on Investment (RoI), Devert said: “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 in that we had a deadline by which we wanted to close our data centre, 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 centre open for an extended period of 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.
“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.
“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 its product, its 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.
