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Newsletter

November 15, 2007

Specialty Bakers

OVERVIEW

Specialty Bakers, Inc. is headquartered in Marysville, Pennsylvania. In business since 1901, the company has a long tradition of baking excellence with two locations, Marysville and Lititz, Pennsylvania. To enhance customer service there are five strategically located satellite sales offices throughout the United States.

As its name indicates, Specialty Bakers specializes in producing high quality baked goods. The principal cake products are Ladyfingers, French TwirlsTM (Creme Horns), Dessert Shells, Cake Rolls and Angel Food Cakes. While the company is known as the Ladyfinger specialist, its product line is significantly broader than just Ladyfingers.

Specialty Bakers has a total of twelve production servers and over 100 workstations across two locations and five satellite offices. They are an Intel based Windows server environment with SQL and Exchange database servers.

CHALLENGES

In 2002, Specialty Bakers was looking for a solution to backup mission critical legacy applications that resided on local workstations. These workstations hosted internally developed applications that impacted EDI, production, business analysis and sales reporting. Traditional disaster recovery using tape devices was extremely slow to backup and even slower to restore, requiring hours to recover files alone. Specialty Bakers needed a solution to restore their workstations as quickly and completely as possible in the event of an emergency.

PRODUCT EVALUATION

Specialty Bakers decided to replace their file based tape solution with a disk imaging solution to reduce downtime during recovery. Initially they evaluated Norton (Symantec) Ghost; however, they quickly ran into issues with the reliability of the Ghost images. Even when they were able to complete an image, there was no guarantee it could be restored. The company also was not satisfied with the user interface and found it difficult to navigate.

Specialty Bakers searched the Internet for a better solution and came across Acronis True Image (v6). The trial of ATI Workstation was a success. The software reliably recovered their workstations and was extremely easy to use. Unlike the previous solution, Acronis’ images consistently restored the workstation operating systems, applications, settings and data. The product was so intuitive that it did not require training for IT staff. The ability to schedule full and incremental images provided fault tolerance while requiring only minimal initial investment of IT time to set up. Return on Investment was immediate.

SOLUTION

Extremely happy with Acronis’ reliability and affordability, Specialty Bakers began installing Acronis True Image on all of their workstations. Since the initial installation, the solution has exceeded their expectations. Acronis True Image’s broad range of features and speed has produced substantial benefits and protection for Specialty Bakers.

The Secure Zone® has proven its value time and again for Specialty Bakers. The Secure Zone is a partition on the local hard drive that Acronis creates and uses to store images locally as well as recover without boot media. Recently, an automated software update was pushed to the company’s workstations that interfered with some legacy applications. The IT staff was able to restore each affected workstation from the Secure Zone in a matter of minutes without bootable media or network connectivity.

Acronis provides several flexible options for accessing the recovery environment. Users have the ability to boot from RIS or PXE server or create bootable media in a variety of formats. On one occasion Specialty Bakers had a failed hard drive in a workstation and lost the machine’s Secure Zone. They were able to replace the workstation’s hard drive and recover everything (OS, applications, settings and data) using a bootable ISO they created and stored on the network.

Since Specialty Bakers experienced so much success with Acronis True Image Workstation, they evaluated Acronis True Image Server for Windows as well. RAID controllers proved to be a major challenge when they tried to use Norton (Symantec) Ghost in their server environment. Acronis True Image provided Specialty Bakers with complete hardware RAID support and they now have Acronis True Image Server installed on all of the servers in their company. The Acronis True Image Server solution provided them with many additional benefits including database imaging for SQL Server and Exchange as well as imaging for offsite storage.

True Image plays a vital role in Specialty Bakers’ disaster recovery plan. The ability to schedule unattended backup tasks and confidence in the ability to recover servers and workstations with minimum downtime continues to make Acronis True Image mission critical to their success.