December 29, 2008
Petroleum Lubricant Company Uses Acronis True Image Echo Software and Virtualization to Escape Hurricane Two evenings before Hurricane Katrina hit the US Gulf coast in 2005, IT manager Justin Giardina moved swiftly through the second floor server room at Delta Petroleum Company. Giardina was wrestling with two emergencies. The first was a decision about whether he and his wife were going to have to evacuate from New Orleans' French Quarter before the storm hit the next afternoon.
The second revolved around his feverish efforts to back up several servers before the storm threatened to take out power and possibly cause flooding of Delta's Metairie, Louisiana headquarters, located only a few miles northwest of New Orleans near the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Founded in 1946, Delta had become one of the largest independent petroleum lubricant manufacturers in North America. Now the hurricane threatened to wipe it all away. "We could see the storm was larger than the whole state of Louisiana," Giardina notes. Earlier that afternoon Giardina had initiated a disaster recovery plan designed to allow the multi-state company's computing operations to continue, in the event the data center was damaged by the coming storm, by moving them all to Houston. It would be critical that this be managed successfully, since if the company's servers went idle, untold revenue could not be realized and communications of all sorts would cease. He quickly took images of each server using Acronis True Image Echo software while radio stations sounded dire pronouncements of a mandatory evacuation. All company data was located in two racks of HP servers. The Windows machines ran Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL applications as well as Symantec anti-virus software. One server hosted Blackberry communications while enterprise servers managed orders over the Web. There were also two Linux development machines to account for: one a test server for development and the front end for Delta's Exchange environment and the other for running the company's publically accessible FTP server. As Giardina kicked off the backups, he was also on the phone with CDW, a large computer products and services seller near Chicago, calling in orders for several large HP servers, along with racks, networking gear, and ancillary supplies for overnight shipment to Delta's Houston offices. That night he joined his wife in New Orleans' French Quarter and monitored the news, contemplating whether to stay or flee to Houston. Decision to evacuate. Very early the next morning, Giardina and his wife realized they would have to evacuate. They loaded their truck and drove northwest out of New Orleans, stopping for 20 minutes at Delta's offices to pick up multiple LaCie four-drive RAID units after loading server images from the office servers. Setting course for Houston, where Delta had another IT facility, heavy traffic turned Giardina's trip into a 28-hour nightmare. When the couple reached Houston, Giardina walked immediately into the company's IT facility in that city with all of his server images on the LaCie units. Reaching the server room, he began restoring the images onto the new servers that had recently been delivered, installed and powered up in anticipation of his arrival. While Giardina had been using Acronis for some time for backups and occasional restores, he'd never had to carry out a disaster recovery, so he crossed his fingers as he began to restore the images onto the new servers. Quickly restored to operation. With the physical installation completed, he installed VMware, brought up a virtual machine and booted the machine from an Acronis Boot Disk ISO image. "At this point the Acronis image would be there ready to go," Giardina says. "Once we booted from the Acronis True Image software utility, we needed only to click recovery and point the application to the backup files on LaCie drives. We could use an Acronis utility, Universal Restore, to bring the image up on the new server," Giardina says. "Only one driver is needed to make this work in VMware: vmscsi.sys. Specify it, push restore and the machine works. That's why we chose VMware." Giardina brought up the first two servers, including the Blackberry server, in only 15 minutes. Other servers, some with upwards of 500GB of data, took longer, but in most cases no more than an hour. A short while later, with all the servers up and running in Houston, the server room in Metairie went dead as power was lost. Seventy-five percent of the town was under water. But not a single bit of data was lost, and services continued uninterrupted out of Houston. "With Acronis, recovering after a disaster was the least of our worries. It still is today."
Reapplying the Acronis messageIn the aftermath of Katrina, Giardina resettled in Houston and joined Houston-based iland Internet Solutions (http://iland.com), a global provider of Managed Colocation and High Speed IP Network and Data services, as chief technology officer. He has brought the Acronis message along, taking with him the advantages of Acronis' ability to support VMware virtualization solutions for iland's customers. In fact, Acronis True Image Echo plays a key role in all of the company's virtual machine hosting efforts. "With Acronis, recovering after a disaster was the least of our worries. It still is today." | 
