SINGAPORE, 23rd August 2012 - Global Production agency, hub+, part of the billion-dollar Omnicom group, has announced that it has successfully installed Acronis® vmProtect™ to backup and protect its entire virtual environment. In doing so, it has cut the time taken to recover a failed virtual machine by over a fifth.
Set up in 1971, hub+ has 85 employees based at its HQ in London and across its network of offices in Singapore, Melbourne and Atlanta. As a production agency it works directly with clients including O2, Barclays and Sainsbury's in the UK, to create press adverts, TV ads, produce and manage short films and interactive websites. It also works with ING and AT&T in Atlanta and Mercedes, Aviva and Singtel in Singapore. With so much data being generated the company recently virtualised its entire infrastructure to a VMware® environment to streamline its processes, reduce its hardware footprint and help manage its costs.
With its critical data now running on 42 virtual machines (VM) across four HP hosts, it needed a backup and recovery solution to safeguard its portfolio of work. If any of hub+' servers went down and they were unable to recover their data quickly and securely it could be detrimental to the entire business with lost projects, revenue, and ultimately damage to its client relationships.
After researching the virtualisation software backup market, hub+ initially picked a solution but was quickly faced with spiraling costs. Crispin Green, IT manager, hub+, explained: "We initially picked Veeam but realised quite quickly that when we needed to add extra hosts and VMs the price went up considerably due to the extra licenses. We decided to have another look at the options and after carrying out numerous tests, we opted for Acronis' fast and simple to use, Acronis vmProtect 7."
Acronis® vmProtect™, has been engineered exclusively for VMware® vSphereTM servers (v4.0, 4.1 or later) using ESX and ESXi hypervisors. It provides hub+ with a simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage disaster recovery solution for agent-less back up and quick recovery of its VMware virtual environments. By deploying Acronis, hub+ can carry out scheduled daily incremental backups and weekly full system backups, which take a full image of the virtual machines, including the applications and operating system.
Green, continues: "Acronis vmProtect simplifies the management of all our backups and allows even non-technical staff to carry out virtual machine recovery to restore data as quickly as possible. With Acronis it takes a matter of minutes whereas our previous product took five times as long. Most importantly it's allowed me the freedom to not worry anymore about our data, I know it's protected and if a disaster occurs our mission critical data and applications are safe."
Bill Taylor-Mountford, President, Asia Pacific at Acronis, said: "Protecting VMware environments shouldn't be complex or costly. Acronis vmProtect is a solution that speaks directly to VMware requirements, allowing businesses to accelerate their virtualisation adoption. IT managers need never question the status, availability or recovery time of their virtual data".
About Acronis:
Acronis is a global cyber protection company that provides natively integrated cybersecurity, data protection, and endpoint management for managed service providers (MSPs), small and medium businesses (SMBs), and enterprise IT departments. Acronis solutions are highly efficient and designed to identify, prevent, detect, respond, remediate, and recover from modern cyberthreats with minimal downtime, ensuring data integrity and business continuity. Acronis offers the most comprehensive security solution on the market for MSPs with its unique ability to meet the needs of diverse and distributed IT environments.
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses. Learn more at www.acronis.com.