August, 2007

Acronis True Image Case Study — Gates Corporation

General information

The multinational company Gates Corporation, a division of Tomkins, was founded in the United States in 1911. Its headquarters are based in Denver, Colorado. Gates Corporation has approximately twenty offices in various countries across Europe, including Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, Italy and the United Kingdom. It manufactures rubber belts, hoses and hydraulic systems. Its principal markets are the automotive industry, heavy industry and agriculture sectors. In Europe, Gates Corporation has five manufacturing sites for rubber belts and two for hoses. Customers include manufacturers from the industries described above as well as Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) parties. Gates delivers its products on a worldwide basis through three divisions: Power Transmission, Automotive Hoses and Hydraulic and Industrial Hose & Connectors.

Online backup and bare-metal recovery to ensure continuity

Gates Europe has a distributed network comprising in total 140 servers spread across its various branches. Some data and applications, such as those related to manufacturing processes and control, are stored on servers in Gates Corporation's European headquarters in Brussels. The company is currently involved in a standardisation project that is to guarantee that the infrastructure meets the company's high quality norms. The choice for a new solution for its backup and restore processes forms part of this project.

"The most important reason for our evaluation of a new backup solution was that we were losing a lot of time reinstalling servers," comments Wim Schollaert, European ICT Infrastructure Manager at Gates Corporation. "Stopping and restarting servers for backup purposes was very time-consuming too. Since Gates manufactures on a 24-hour basis, any downtime caused a major disruption to our operations." Consequently, Gates started looking for a backup solution offering bare-metal recovery features that would enable a quick reinstallation of servers. Schollaert: "One of our objectives was to shorten the backup window to improve the continuity of our business operations. We wanted to prevent downtime caused by backups. In the previous set-up, we were forced to take servers completely offline during backup operations, so the production would have to stop as well. That was something we wanted to avoid."

Retrieving data within minutes

Acronis True Image Enterprise Server offers the resources to create an exact image of the server disk, including the operating system, applications and configuration, without causing any downtime. Consequently, servers can be booted from an image whenever a problem occurs. However, this is not the solution's only benefit. Whenever necessary Gates is able to quickly retrieve backed up data from disk. "In the previous setup, this process took up anywhere between half a day to 24 hours. With Acronis this process only takes five to ten minutes. This means a boost for our productivity as well as greater availability" comments Schollaert. Added to which, the solution is extremely user-friendly. IT managers can use it without prior training. Schollaert: "It really comes down to installing the solution and using it."

Another important requirement of Gates was that the backup solution would offer maximum ease-of-use. "Our intention was to minimise the amount of management involved," explains Schollaert. "Besides downtime, we were faced with the challenge of last year's migration from Novell to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and our objective of taking the availability of our infrastructure to a higher level. So a powerful backup solution for Windows severs was extremely necessary, to say the least."

A complete and cost-efficient solution

A British branch of Gates that had been using Acronis products for some time pointed out the Acronis True Image Workstation solution to Schollaert. The solution's broad range of features combined with minimal downtime immediately caught Gates' interest. Gates opted for a phased deployment of the Acronis solution. Schollaert: "At the moment we are running Acronis True Image Enterprise Server on twenty servers. We intend to expand this number in the near future. In order to benefit from international support, we are working closely with Acronis' partner Dolmen."

European roll out for a complete company-wide implementation

Gates is very pleased with the features offered by the Acronis solution and plans to expand its use in the future. "Needless to say, we are still very busy with the European roll-out," explains Schollaert. "Eventually, 1,000 employees will benefit from this solution. We have already defined the following project phases. For example, we want to use the solution for backup processes related to manufacturing equipment. We are currently evaluating the possibility of remote backups and disaster recovery. And if Acronis should decide to add "incremental forever'" features to its solution, we would be the first to try it. As far as we are concerned, the possibilities of Acronis True Image Enterprise Server are far from exhausted."

About Acronis

Acronis provides advanced, scalable storage management and disaster recovery software that helps enterprises safeguard their information and assures the availability, security, integrity and recoverability of their infrastructure. Acronis' patented disk imaging and disk management technology have won broad industry acclaim and numerous awards for excellence in data protection, backup and recovery, system deployment, and server migration for both physical and virtual machine servers. Its flagship product, Acronis True Image, is a leading commercial disk-imaging and bare-metal restore solution for Windows and Linux servers, as well as an automated system portability and migration tool. Since 2002, Acronis True Image has been the solution of choice for tens of thousands of customers, from small to mid-size businesses to the Fortune 500 in the banking, professional services, healthcare, technology, retail, government and manufacturing markets.

A global company, Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia and sells its products both direct and through enterprise resellers. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.eu or contact our PR and Marketing Leader Julie Grivel Delillaz at media_eu@acronis.com.