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電子報

October 28, 2005

Original pdf (77 Kb)

Acronis True Image Success Story — Tyco Electronics

Overview

In Singapore Tyco Electronics was established in 1979 as a sales office and in 1983 became a design, manufacturing and testing centre. It occupies a floor space of about 30,000 square meters. Today the facility houses about 1200 employees. Tyco Electronics strengths and capabilities lie in its product design, tooling/plating line design/fabrication capabilities. Over the years it has received accreditation in ISO 9001, QS 9000, IS 14001 and TS 16949 certification and awarded the Singapore Quality Class. It is certified by ITE as an OJT centre & ISO/IEC 17025 SINGLAS Laboratory by SPRING. In its quest to further it competitiveness it has added another feather to its cap this year with the ward of OHSMS Certificate to OHSAS 18001:1999 standard. Plant operations and back office functions are supported by about 10 servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2000.

Challenges

For the past three years, Tyco Electronics Singapore has been using a file-based backup product to replicate data on its servers. While this functioned adequately, the backup process required that each server be taken down for 30 – 45 minutes on average to complete the task, with users essentially unable to perform any productive work during that time. Also, a significant amount of man hours was spent on scheduling downtime, notifying users of such, and other related tasks.

In addition, if a server were to go down unexpectedly, more than half a day would be needed to achieve complete restoration, with much of the time spent on reconfiguring hardware, loading system and application software, reinstalling data and other tasks. Even then, the data from the time of the last backup to when the failure occurred would have been lost.

Product Evaluation

After deciding that there was room for improvement in its server backup regime, the Information Systems Department at Tyco Electronics Singapore came up with a wish list of features in its new backup-and-restore system:

• automated scheduling of server imaging
• online imaging of server disks
• to the minute disk images
• fast restoration of downed servers

Of the solutions evaluated by Tyco Electronics Singapore, only the Acronis product line was found to have these capabilities — and more.

"Other than the ability to create snapshot server disk images online and do 'set once and forget' scheduling, what we found most compelling about Acronis was the ease of being able to go back to the last known usable state without having to do a laborious bare-bones boot up, "said George Wee, Systems Administrator, Information Systems Department.

Another feature that impressed Tyco Electronics Singapore is the Acronis Secure Zone, a special, hidden partition on the local hard disk that is used to store disk and partition images, thus eliminating the need for dedicated disk backup storage. Another key feature, the ability to plug disk images as virtual drives offers the choice of retrieving particular files or folders, further reduced restoration time.

Immediate Benefits

Tyco Electronics Singapore piloted Acronis True Image 8.0 Enterprise Server for Windows on two of its mission-critical servers and Acronis True Image 8.0 Corporate Workstation on a workstation used by a key senior manager in May 2005.

"The wizard-driven implementation process was very straightforward. Day-to-day use is very easy too, thanks to the user-friendly graphical interface. There was no need for retraining, "said Mr. Wee.

And the Acronis investment couldn't have come at a better time: a few days after the software was installed, one of the servers with Acronis True Image 8.0 Enterprise Server for Windows crashed due to hard disk failure.

"With the Acronis solution, we achieved full restoration in less than 20 minutes, compared with the half-day or more that would have been needed previously. And just as important, we were able to go back to the last known usable state without losing the day's work, "said Mr. Wee.

Extended Deployment

Tyco Electronics Singapore now performs a full backup of the hard disks in the Acronis-equipped mission-critical servers and key-user workstation every month. Backup for the latter is done remotely using the Acronis True Image Management Console, with backup disk images stored in the respective Secure Zones. According to Mr. Wee, the company is streamlining its backup processes and will most likely do incremental backups and more frequent full backups.

In addition, the Information Systems Department will be recommending to higher management that the deployment of the Acronis solutions be extended to more servers and critical workstations. It will also be looking at how to incorporate the disk images created using the Acronis software into the company's disaster recovery plans. Already, it has recommended the Acronis solutions to a sister Tyco entity located in Singapore, Mr. Wee said.