Gerard Darel Secures and Protects its Virtual Infrastructure with Acronis® vmProtect™

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, 18 June 2012 - Gérard Darel, the leading French designer and global retailer of mid to high-end women's ready-to-wear clothing and leather goods, has deployed Acronis to reduce its Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective for its virtual infrastructure. Acronis vmProtect 7 currently protects more than 300 virtualised workstations and 100 virtualised servers at the corporate headquarters.

Following a successful brand awareness campaign, and the expansion of retail outlets all over the world, the IT department faced an increasing challenge. It needed to ensure business continuity of its headquarters and make sure that critical data on virtual machines is available to anybody, at any time, from anywhere and is protected against disaster - whether it is human error or a result of a natural disaster.

Under the leadership of Samuel Chemouni, Technical Director at Gerard Darel, the organisation has been relying on VMware virtualisation technology for its infrastructure for four years. While the cost and efficiency benefits of virtualisation were clear to the IT department, Chemouni realised that his backup and recovery provisions were currently inadequate.

After vigorous testing of several solutions, Gérard Darel chose Acronis vmProtect. Chemouni explained: "During the testing of Acronis vmProtect, we found that the backup process only took a few clicks and was completed in less than 5 minutes. This was without any prior training of the team or any contact with Acronis for support. Compared to its main competitors, Acronis vmProtect proved to be the easiest to use, fastest for recovery and the most efficient solution," said Chemouni.

Acronis vmProtect can protect the VMware vSphere environment including servers and workstations, without the need for in-depth IT training and with the ability to back up on a regular basis and quickly restore damaged or lost machines, through imaging, replication and BMR capability.

"The software is intuitive and offers a full range of functionalities. It perfectly suits our needs and includes everything needed to launch a backup plan which provides IT managers with peace of mind," concluded Chemouni. "Acronis vmProtect is one of the leading products of 2012. To date, no other product on the market is as easy-to-use and efficient for the protection of our virtual machines."

For more information visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGkj6s9dY1Q

Gérard Darel, a leading French fashion house and retailer of mid to high-end women's ready-to-wear clothing and leather goods, was first established in 1971. With more than 300 points of sale worldwide, including 140 single brand stores and three on-line retail sites.