Acronis Resource Center

電子報

November 16, 2006

Acronis True Image Success Story — NTUC Income

Company Overview

NTUC Income, a cooperative insurance society, was formed in 1970. With a modest start-up capital of only $1.2 million, it has become Singapore's leading life, general and health insurer with total assets of S$16 billion and more than 1.8 million policyholders. NTUC Income is now one of Asia's most successful companies, being accredited with a Standard and Poor's AA rating for its financial soundness.

The IT infrastructure consists of more than 1800 workstations, of these; some 100 users with important user data have Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation installed. The headquarters houses approximately 60 servers running on a mixture of Windows NT server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Novell, RedHat Linux, HPUX and AIX. 14 of these servers use Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows.

Challenges

NTUC Income was using a competitive deployment server tool for the cloning of servers before implementing Acronis True Image. The competitive product required the IT manager to take the servers offline when backing up. This was unacceptable because it often required extensive downtime for the entire company or the network administrators had to perform the backups in the early hours of the morning when nobody is accessing the system. NTUC Income required a solution that provides live backups to ensure that day-to-day operations were not interrupted during backups.

Additionally, the IT managers needed to make broadcast announcements to notify users that the servers were going down. This extra step took up mailbox space, bandwidth and the administrator’s time. All these issues translated into extra expenses of IT and personnel assets; what the IT manager really needed was something less disruptive to staff that still would create complete backups. NTUC Income was also searching for a solution with the ability to restore an entire server, including the operating system and custom configurations, should a disaster strike.

Product Evaluation

A visit to online discussion forums soon introduced Mr. Lim Say Ho, network administrator at the insurance company, to Acronis True Image. The rave reviews by the forum members prompted him to download his first trial version of Acronis True Image 8.0 Enterprise Server. He was so impressed with Acronis True Image’s overall robust functionality, reliability and user interface that he wanted to implement Acronis True Image at his workplace.

Mr. Lim considered other product options such as Veritas Bare Metal Restore, but the company opted again it in part because NTUC Income’s systems are Windows-based and do not require UNIX. Additionally, Acronis True Image’s aggressive enterprise pricing was more attractive.

In fact, NTUC Income became one of the first corporate clients to implement the Acronis True Image solution after Acronis Asia set up its office in Singapore in December 2004. The insurance company first purchased Acronis True Image 8.0 Enterprise Server for both workstations and servers. Currently, NTUC Income has upgraded to Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows and Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation.

Benefits

"As a financial institution, we are legislated by law to archive up to seven years of data offsite. We have many very important servers such as our master backup server, which we need to keep online all the time. Moreover, none of the data on the tapes can be retrieved if the system crashes and the program required to read the data is in one of the tapes. We do not have the time to reinstall and reconfigure the operating system and recover the applications and settings. A fast disaster recovery solution is essential to achieve business continuity and Acronis True Image is able to provide that." says Mr. Lim.

Acronis True Image has such a user-friendly wizard driven interface that the MIS department hardly had to give the staff any training. They get the software, install it and start scheduling the backups themselves, he said.

"Acronis True Image really frees up all the staff’s time because backups are performed even when the system is live so nobody really knows. The staff can choose to have the backup files stored in the Acronis Secure Zone^®, a special hidden partition in the same hard disk. The staff can also store them in a variety of storage media including options like external USB hard disks, additional internal hard disk, CDs and DVDs. I also like the fact that the Acronis website captured all of NTUC Income’s Acronis product information. It contains information which helps me keep track of when which license is going to expire and how many copies we have. Overall, I’d say Acronis True Image is a cost effective BMR (bare metal restore) solution for Windows platform."

"I also like the fact that the Acronis website captured all of NTUC Income’s Acronis product information. It contains information which helps me keep track of when which license is going to expire and how many copies we have. Overall, I’d say Acronis True Image is a cost effective BMR (bare metal restore) solution for Windows platform."

Mr. Lim