Acronis Resource Center

電子報

September 29, 2005

Acronis True Image Success Story — CINECA

Overview

CINECA (Interuniversity Consortium)is a Consortium consisting of 25 Italian Universities and CNR (National Research Council). Established in 1969, CINECA is currently the most important computing center in Italy and one of the major centers worldwide. Its institutional mission is to support the Italian scientific community through supercomputing and its applications. Since the end of the 1980s, CINECA has broadened the scope of its institutional mission by gradually embracing all IT sectors. Thanks to the skills built up in its over 30 year history, the Consortium is able to guarantee exceptional standards of quality in the provision of its services.

Key Challenges

CINECA was looking for a disaster recovery solution. As a result of a flood,the organization understood that a disaster recovery solution that enabled rapid recovery from a disaster was imperative. In addition, CINECA was looking for a solution that could quickly clone an entire server — including the operating system, software, patches, upgrades, and licenses with out reinstallation — as building a new server was time consuming and tedious.

Product Evaluation

CINECA evaluated a number of other solutions in addition to open source products. The organization discovered that Acronis True Image Enterprise Server was the only product that enabled backup of a server without a reboot. In addition, CINECA felt the product had a very user-friendly interface and was less complicated than other solutions.

Once Acronis True Image Enterprise Server was selected, CINECA tested the application thoroughly. IT staff successfully cloned and restored web servers, database servers, application servers, and domain controllers. One of the most important tests was to simulate disaster recovery on servers with different hardware. IT staff was able to restore an image with a different Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) using Acronis True Image Enterprise Server with no difficulties.

We now have a disaster recovery solution and peace of mind. Regardless of the cause of failure — natural disasters,unstable patches,or viruses — we can restore our systems in a few hours. Our implementation of Acronis True Image Enterprise Server is a complete success.

Stefano Milan
System Administrator
CINECA

Complete Success

CINECA has successfully implemented Acronis True Image Enterprise Server. Currently,40 servers run the software, representing 100% of CINECA's mission critical Windows servers. Acronis True Image Enterprise Server is the standard software for disaster recovery and server cloning. Full images of each server are created weekly or monthly. The images are saved to a storage server, then backed up using CINECA's backup system and deleted from the file system of the storage server.CINECA and third party proprietary applications are running on the servers. The servers are configured as web servers, database servers, terminal servers and file servers both in stand-alone and clustered environments. Acronis True Image Enterprise Server was implemented by CINECA with no training.