French retailer Auchan has undergone a modernization project at three of its data centers in France.

During the Huawei Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum in Paris, Auchan CTO Pierre Francois Rudant shared how the company has reduced its five-year total cost of operation (TCO) by more than 60 percent, and improved its O&M efficiency by around 200 percent by adopting Huawei's technology at its data centers.

According to Rudant, the company was looking to modernize, but was facing a challenge due to its large number of applications (around four times its competitors), and with the company heavily relying on cloud providers, its total cost of ownership was "somehow 100 percent above what was expected, plus looking at the prices rising."

During the last six months, the company has been working towards improving its IT efficiency, starting with a legacy data center in Lyon, which was running with VMware.

The company selected Huawei's DCS (Datacenter Virtualization Solution) instead, while also migrating out of the legacy data center into another facility.

Beyond that initial migration, Auchan also sought to increase resiliency, which it did by establishing three data centers: two in Lille, and a third in Paris as a "disaster recovery site." All three were deployed using the Huawei DCS platform.

"The third phase that we're currently engaging in is to create a one called architecture relying on operation and operational enhancements and efficiency delivered by Huawei's team to increase our capacity to reduce our TCO, and also to cover all the best practices that are running in your retail business."

Rudant added that the company is using the high-performance technology on Dorado (Huawei's all-flash storage line), specifically the OceanStor Dorado 8000, as well as Huawei's OceanProtect X9000, a backup storage solution.

While Auchan is now using a hybrid public and private cloud model, Rudant noted that this was a "challenge."

"Auchan has been using cloud services for a while, and we didn't have the proper level of expertise at home. Therefore, with this full-stack from Huawei, we were facilitating the integration, but also ensuring a complete availability of service data."

He concluded: "We were massively using cloud services, we were massively using subcontractors towards that, and one of the ambitions of this project, besides setting this infrastructure, is also to allow our income of people onboarding, jumping into the trend, so as to develop their skills. That will be ultimately something very valuable both for the company and the people working with us."

Auchan was founded in 1961 with one store. Today, it has nearly 3,000 locations operating in 12 countries. The company is a known customer of Google Cloud, with it announcing in 2023 that it was looking to migrate to a single cloud platform to help reduce its technical debt.