Introduction
Euskaltel is the leading telecommunications operator in the Basque Country. The company offers fixed and mobile telephony, Internet and digital television, through its extended fiber optic network, spread out in the company’s 10 year of existence. Between 2008 and 2010, Euskaltel will invest 200 million euro to provide the most advanced telecommunication services to the Basque society. This raises Euskaltel’s total investment to 1.600 million euro, focussed specially in extending the broad band capacity both in its mobile and its fixed telephony network. At the end of 2008, Euskaltel had deployed more than 271.000 kilometres of fiber optic in all the Basque Country area.
Supporting the new Biscaytik project
In 2008, the diputación foral (provincial delegation) of Bizkaia launched the BiscayTIK project, an initiative from this regional Basque authority which is designed to promote the development of information and communication technologies between the region’s citizens. Among other activities, the BiscayTIK project provided a free email service for all Biscayan’s citizens, under the bizcaia.eu domain, and with a 5GB storage capacity.
This project was leveraged by Microsoft, as diputación foral of Vizcaya partner. Euskaltel, as hosting provider for the Microsoft platform, set up a Windows 2003 infrastructure that supports the Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail service.
To guarantee the availability of this e-mail service, Euskaltel clearly identified the need to implement a fast and flexible backup solution that ensured recovery in serious incidences or disaster situations.
The challenges: to find an easy to install and use solution
When choosing a particular backup solution, Euskaltel’s engineers considered different criteria. First, they needed a tool capable of making instant copies of the operating systems and with the capability to perform bare-metal data recovery, specifically, to restore the system after a complete disaster. In this sense, they evaluated various alternatives, although the complexity of other tools made them choose Acronis solutions. For Euskaltel, it was essential to have a tool which was easy to install, configure, maintain and operate.
For this reason, they chose Acronis True Image Echo Power Edition Enterprise Server, to be installed in the 14 servers with Windows 2003. The Universal Restore option enabled Euskaltel to restore an image of the servers in dissimilar hardware or virtual machines, thus providing a full disaster recovery, even for the most unpredictable situations.
To develop this project, Euskaltel relied on SCC, Acronis Enterprise Partner. SCC evaluated several solutions in the market to find the one that best suited Euskaltel’s needs for such a critical platform.
"Acronis softwares fit perfectly with Euskaltel’s needs in terms of quickly and safety solutions, and the results since the first tests have been successful. We are convinced that in the near future, this experience will allow us to help more clients with high levels of protection, quick recovery and back into service needs", says Salvador Tauroni, from SCC.
Instant Backup
The Euskaltel e-mail system is a mission-critical service that demands a very high availability, therefore it was essential to be able to do instant backups, that did not require tocut the service and provided a high protection with reduced operation costs.
"The possibility of being able to make remote backups instantly, and to rapidly restore images stored in disk, even in dissimilar hardware, provides a high-level protection against contingencies at a reasonable operational cost," states Josu del Alamo, Euskaltel’s Systems Director.
Conclusion
Thanks to the simplicity of the Acronis solutions and its intuitive user interface, the implementation project could be carried out internally, without having to hire external professional services or offering additional training for Euskaltel’s employees. As it is easy to install and configure, the engineers were able to deploy Acronis’ solutions in less than a week. In general, the scarce demand of configuration, administration, management and operation resources of the Acronis solutions enabled Euskaltel to minimize operative costs, including hidden costs.
About Acronis®
Acronis is a global provider of storage management software that enables corporations and individuals to move, manage and maintain digital assets. Acronis sells innovative solutions for disaster recovery, server consolidation and virtualization migration, which allow users to maintain business continuity and reduce downtime in computing environments. Acronis software products are sold in more than 180 countries and are available in 13 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.eu
Acronis International GmbH,