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Newsletter

January 23, 2007

VicRoads trading as Roads Corporation

Overview

VicRoads, Victoria’s Roads Corporation is the governmental body that oversees the state of the transport system in Victoria and the management of the Victorian arterial road network.

Responsible for 22,320km of road network, VicRoads also manages the strategies and programs promoting road safety, and provides vehicle registration and driver licensing services.

The 45 Registration and Licensing offices of the Business Operations Division of VicRoads hosts 250 servers, including four BladeCenters and 40 blade servers. Of these blade servers, half are single disk SAN connected blades. Windows® 2003 is the main platform operating in the offices with a small number of Windows® 2000, and NT platforms (currently being upgraded to Windows® 2000).

Challenges

VicRoads had no remote imaging process in place for backup of servers located at the Registration and Licensing offices. When one of their offices experienced a server crash, VicRoads began looking for an imaging product so as to avoid lengthy downtimes in the future. They also wanted to ensure the recovery process would be quick and straightforward without placing extra strain on staff.

Product Evaluation

VicRoads internally manages 250 servers, of which 40 are blade servers in four BladeCenters. About half of the blades are single disk SAN connected blades (no RAID). There are about 45 servers external to Head Office which act as domain controller and file servers. There are 15 Lotus Notes servers - mostly on blades. The rest of the server fleet are for numerous applications, including web hosting and internal application requirements.

Initially, in 2005, 50 licenses for Acronis True Image 8.0 Server for Windows were purchased. These were implemented throughout the 45 regional offices, the remainder being committed to machines VicRoads considered most important.

More recently, additional purchases of 55 Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows have been made for the single disk blade servers and more vulnerable, mission critical servers. Acronis True Image 9.1 Universal Restore for Server has also been purchased to ensure an optimal disaster recovery plan is in place.

Benefits

Bernie Bosma, Server Operations Officer from VicRoads commented, "We have been very happy with the software. It has caused no problems in our 105 installations and has not failed us in any way. We have not had a remote office server crash since installing Acronis True Image but several of our single disk blade servers have had disk failures from which we recovered in less than an hour by having the image."

Scheduled imaging of their server boot partitions is performed each weeknight and their transmission time has been reduced by being able to store the images on in-office PCs.

VicRoads has discovered other benefits of Acronis True Image, not initially considered when acquiring the software. Aside from providing backup and recovery relief, VicRoads have improved space issues by partitioning their disks and utilising the freed-up space.

Further advantages have arisen with the BartPE plug-in included in the latest version of Acronis True Image 9.1 — allowing the offices to produce a boot-up CD using remote control software. At this stage the process has only been tested locally, however it is expected this change will negate the need for user attendance during repairs at the remote office. A single staff member from the office will be required to start up the server using the boot CD, and then the image will be restored remotely from Head Office.