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Newsletter

May 17, 2005

Original pdf (72 Kb)

Acronis True Image Success Story — Desert Schools Federal Credit Union

Company Overview

Founded in 1939 with little more than a hope for some financial peace of mind, 15 teachers pooled their money (just $5.25 each) to establish Desert Schools Federal Credit Union. Their goal was a simple one: build a cooperative network to lean on when funds were short and benefit from as investments grew. With $2 billion in assets and more than 50 locations by the end of 2005, Desert Schools Federal Credit Union is now Arizona's largest credit union and a financial partner to more than 286,000 members in Gila, Maricopa and Pinal counties.

As a business, Desert Schools is a not-for-profit financial institution that is owned by its members. As a friend, the credit union returns earnings to its members through lower loan rates and higher dividend yields. Members also enjoy the reassurance that their funds are insured up to $100,000 by the National Credit Union Administration, an agency of the U.S. Government. Desert Schools Federal Credit Union is dedicated to providing outstanding member assistance through its full range of financial services, playing a positive role in the community. As technologies improve and markets fluctuate, the credit union continues to offer additional self-service online tools, while maintaining the tight-knit community atmosphere that is the core of Desert Schools.

Key Challenges

Desert Schools Federal Credit Union was looking for a solution that did not require reconfiguration of servers for restoration. This was mainly because its mission critical servers required a great deal of operating system-specific configuration for DCOM and other services. The organization was seeking an image-based solution, as a file-level one was not desirable because it would have required reconfiguration of these services on any newly-restored system in the event of failure or disaster. It also was looking for a solution that could backup end-user desktop PCs prior to upgrades or maintenance.

The company's previous backup-and-restore solution required the creation of a DOS boot disk for each type of machine in order to make consistent images and store them on the network. Desert Schools was attracted to Acronis True Image because of its ability to create a snapshot of the system with the machine online and mount the image file as a virtual drive in Windows to restore individual files. In addition, the ability to schedule incremental backups represented a huge savings in backup time and server space.

Product Evaluation

Desert Schools began with an evaluation license of Acronis True Image. The credit union tested the product on different workstations, ensuring that the product could:

1) be used with all types of workstations in their environment
2) could backup images to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device
3) take consistent snapshots of a live Windows system
4) mount an image as a virtual drive to restore individual files

Desert Schools was able to perform all activities using the product and ordered Acronis True Image 7.0 for each workstation.

As Desert Schools became more comfortable with the software, it decided to expand usage of the product to its mission-critical servers. The credit union purchased a couple licenses of Acronis True Image Enterprise Server and began backing up mission.critical servers with the product. The credit union was completely satisfied with the product's performance on servers and has been purchasing additional licenses of Acronis True Image Enterprise Server as it brings more systems online that need to be recovered as quickly as possible.

Complete Success

Desert Schools has successfully implemented Acronis True Image. All mission critical workstations are backed up using Acronis True Image 7.0 prior to maintenance, computer troubleshooting, and upgrades. Acronis True Image 8.0 Enterprise Server is used to backup 15 of the most mission-critical servers on a weekly basis, representing 8% of all servers in the organization. The image files are backed up to tape and sent offsite for disaster recovery purposes. Desert Schools plans to backup more servers with Acronis True Image Enterprise Server in the future. The product was fully implemented quickly and easily, without any training of IT staff.

System Restore in Minutes, Not Hours Days

Desert Schools has already tested the solution in real life. It has used the product to restore a development server in minutes rather than hours it would have taken to rebuild from scratch. Due to the complex configurations in the credit union's environment, requiring registry modifications, specialized security requirements, and other settings, the product has made it much easier to restore a system from an image instead of from scratch. The product has decreased the time to restore production servers in the event of system corruption, virus infection or other software failure. It has also increased the number of people who are able to restore these systems because it is so easy to use that an individual just needs to know which image file to select to restore a system.