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January 23, 2007

Redcliffe City Council

Overview

The Queensland city of Redcliffe is managed and serviced by the Redcliffe City Council which is the local government responsible for overseeing the general operation of the city. The Redcliffe City Council has an annual budget of approximately $72 million and uses these funds to provide a wide range of services to benefit the Redcliffe community. Such services include: road maintenance and construction, business and tourism, support, town planning and development, waste management and recycling, water and sewerage, community, cultural and youth activities, public health and animal control, library services and maintenance of parks and other public areas.

The Redcliffe City Council operates with over 30 servers working on Windows® and Unix®.

Challenges

Originally, the Redcliffe City Council installed only system and application software on Windows servers. Their backup procedure involved storing the application data in databases located on other drives and backing them up nightly. They required the means to create a ‘system state’ for their servers, so that in the event of a system disk failure they would be able to perform a complete system restore without the need to rebuild or re-install any software.

Product Evaluation

The Redcliffe City Council estimated the cost would be too high in the event of an emergency, such as a system or disk failure, where they would require the application supplier to re-install their software. Consequently, they decided to implement a more advanced defense against such a situation in order to significantly minimise their recovery time and outlay.

For their testing, the Council trialled two disk-imaging brands (Acronis and Paragon) which were readily available and matched their requirements.

The Redcliffe City Council used Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows to perform the objective by using a simple deployment to a couple of their servers. They initially purchased nine licenses to cover the mission-critical servers and later, following a successful deployment, procured another four licenses to be used on additional servers in the office.

They also successfully trialled Acronis True Image 9.1 Universal Restore for Server by simulating a system crash and recovering the backup to a bare metal server.

Overall the Council found Acronis worked on all their Windows servers, while tests with the Paragon software had particular difficulty with raided systems.

Benefits

John Mulcahy, Information Systems Manager at Redcliffe City Council oversaw the implementation of the Acronis True Image software and from previous experience with their server monitoring, he found Acronis True Image to be the most suitable solution for the Council’s problem.

The process was straightforward, without any unexpected difficulties. The Redcliffe City Council was able to trial and implement the software to create a more advanced and reliable backup and restore procedure for their servers, for a minimum cost and with "no additional load on staff".

In addition to the disk-imaging and restore tasks performed using Acronis True Image, they discovered further benefits from using Acronis True Image. "We also found that as we moved to server virtualisation Acronis was the ideal tool to move the whole server environment", explained Mulcahy.