Ireland’s Top Department Store Smartens up its Image with Acronis®

The group IT director at Brown Thomas, was becoming concerned about the retailer’s server protection strategy. Growing amounts of data meant that server backups were increasingly taking much longer – this was particularly worrying as the retailer’s existing solutions required servers to be taken offline in order to create a full backup. If data volumes continued to grow, Rylands knew that soon it would be almost impossible for the IT team to complete its daily server backups outside the retailer’s working hours.

Key Challenges:

• Create a centralised, single vendor backup and recovery solution for servers, PCs and laptops
• Reduce backup and recovery time 
• Develop bespoke disaster recovery solution for the retailer’s Point of Sale (POS) systems
• Cut costs associated with server rebuilds – both in terms of lost business and outsourced IT contractor fees

Environment:

• 300 PCs and laptops running on various Windows® platforms
• 60 Dell servers running on Windows® Server

Solution:

• Acronis® True Image Echo™ Server
• Acronis® True Image Echo™ Workstation

Business Benefits:

• Time to backup a full server reduced from 1.5 hours to 15 minutes in some cases
• A server can be reconfigured in under one hour, previously it took approximately 11 hours
• Greater confidence in data recoverability in the event of a server, PC or laptop failure
• Server backup images easily transferable to remote datacentre via a secure network for increased resilience
• Time taken to rebuild a till cut from two hours to five minutes
• Deployment speed 30 times quicker than a manual build