Education Market Learns a Lesson From Acronis

MICROSOFT TECH-ED (BOOTH #935), BOSTON, MA. (JUNE 12, 2006) — Acronis, Inc., the technological leader in storage management software (https://www.acronis.com), announced that it is expanding its reach in the education market. The company, which already boasts a number of colleges, universities and public school systems as customers, said it has added several additional schools to its family of customers that purchased its disk imaging and partitioning software to simplify IT management.

Among the newest members of the Acronis family are Greenville College and Brown University, both of which implemented Acronis True Image to ensure speedy recovery of their software systems. The Centennial School District in suburban Philadelphia has implemented Acronis Disk Director Server to maximize mission-critical server usage.

Greenville College, a four-year accredited Christian liberal arts school with more than 1,300 students in Greenville, IL, licensed Acronis True Image and recently purchased Acronis Snap Deploy to update and streamline its existing process for cloning systems. The college, which purchased 400 licenses, now can image and clone computer systems on campus without the need to worry about whether existing hardware, such as Ethernet network cards, are supported on the new systems.

"We have been using Acronis True Image for over a year, and recently started using Acronis Snap Deploy," said Dan S. Wolfe, support technician at the Greenville College IT Help Desk. "In researching imaging solutions, we did not find any as fast or easy to use as Acronis. It now takes just a couple minutes to backup or restore a system over our network, instead of an hour or more. Because it utilizes Linux, we don't have to worry about finding Ethernet drivers for our systems anymore."

Brown University, based in Providence, RI, is a member of the Ivy League and the seventh oldest university in America. Recently Brown's Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies switched to the Acronis True Image family of backup and disaster recovery products after it determined that corporate needs were not being met by its existing Fortune 1000 vendor. The center had three key requirements for its Windows 2003 Servers: Improve the center's disaster recovery in terms of total cost of ownership; improve the return on investment; and improve the efficiency of restoration (EOR).

"Acronis software has been the easiest disaster recovery product to learn and use, and to teach to my staff," said Rick Smith, network manager for the Center for Alcohol & Addiction Studies (CAAS). "We had tested a competitor's product for four months without success. I became an immediate fan of Acronis after installing it and running an image. It took just 20 minutes to install and my first image was successful! We use Acronis for our file and print servers, domain naming servers and for Windows Internet Naming Service servers."

Centennial School District in suburban Philadelphia, which educates 6,400 children in grades K-12, had a number of mission-critical servers that were running out of hard disk space within the server partitions. The district licensed Acronis Disk Server 10.0 to repartition the hard drives on its five production servers quickly and easily. As a result, the servers are no longer at risk of crashing due to hard disk space issues. The server reconfiguration was completed quickly, saving IT staff many hours — or possibly days — of rebuilding the servers from scratch.

"Acronis Disk Director saved our department many man-hours of labor. We were able to reconfigure our servers to maximize performance in a couple of minutes as opposed to rebuilding the servers from scratch," said Fran Watkins, IT administrator, Centennial School District.

Acronis True Image ensures quicker, more transparent system and desktop recovery. By taking a snapshot of the disk sectors of a running server or workstation, then storing that snapshot to a network share, external drive or even the Acronis Secure Zone®, Acronis True Image lets users or IT managers recover data, be it an individual file or an entire hard disk, in minutes instead of hours or days. Complete system restoration can be performed to an existing system, to a new system with different hardware or to a virtual machine.

Acronis Disk Director Server allows IT managers to create and manage partitions, as well as restore lost or deleted partitions, and, in some cases, all of the data from those lost partitions.