Acronis Resource Center

電子報

June 03, 2008

Stargate Digital

Overview

Stargate Digital is an Emmy Award-winning visual effects company that continually works under tight deadlines for some high-profile television shows. It needed proven disaster recovery plan for Windows and Linux systems, which includes the ability to recover rapidly from a disaster.

Needing disaster recovery — and getting more

Originally, Stargate thought it was building a system that would be used in the event of catastrophic hardware failures. What it got was a much more flexible and useful system than expected. Stargate knew that having redundant hardware and spare parts for all critical servers and workstations was only part of a solution. Due to the extensive amount of custom software running everywhere on its network, the company also needed a way to return a system to a completely configured environment easily and reliably. Disk imaging software gives Stargate the tool to make this possible. After detailed research into the products available on the market, Stargate chose Acronis software.

As the company got further into the project and began to deploy Acronis True Image Enterprise Server 9.1, the IT staff began to find some unanticipated uses for the product. For example, by taking advantage of the ability to make differential "snapshots" of the OS, the company has been able to easily undo the effects of deploying faulty software. It also has been able to get double duty from some of its render drones; being able to switch OSes and applications between Linux and Microsoft Windows in less than 6 minutes means that a Windows system can be a fully configured Windows system in the time it takes to walk to canteen and get a cup of coffee. The company sends out crews to various locations around the planet to obtain material for its Virtual Backlot system; having an up-to-date snapshot of the systems that can be sent out into the field for reliable disaster recovery is a major bonus.

Considering the backup landscape, and choosing Acronis

Stargate looked at a variety of widely known backup and recover solutions, and the consensus of the IT department was that Acronis emerged as the clear winner. The company looked not only at the software’s ease of use, its features and reliability, but also at the Acronis’ entire product line. The IT department began by getting very comfortable with Acronis True Image workstation software. Then, they moved on to the Universal Restore option; they were very impressed with the speed with which this software can move a configured system to totally disparate hardware. After that, they investigated and began to use the Enterprise Server software. Again, the performance and ease of use allowed them to exploit other, not so obvious uses for this software.

Out-of-sight, out-of-mind (but always there)

The mission statement for the IT staff at Stargate is similar to the philosophy of the visual effects work they do:

"If you notice the results of what we do, we’re probably not doing things well enough."

The workstations at Stargate are powerful pieces of equipment when they are running smoothly; IT's job is to have these systems as reliable and responsive — and therefore as unobtrusive — as a telephone or refrigerator. This allows the artists to focus on what they do best: visual effects.

Due to the tremendous pressure to produce work for its clients on time and under budget, Stargate Digital’s network necessitates a 99.995% uptime. Hardware failover, redundant and hot-standby systems are only part of the equation; a truly reliable software recovery system is equally important. Acronis True Image Enterprise Server delivered.