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電子報

February 14, 2006

Original pdf (75 Kb)

Acronis True Image Success Story — FCStone Group, Inc.

Overview

FCStone is a broad-based commodity risk management and trading company headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa. It currently has 13 offices in the U.S., plus four international locations.

In 2000, the company acquired Saul Stone, a well-respected futures commission company that was instrumental in the commodities markets for more than 75 years. The merged companies became FCStone Group, Inc.

FCStone offers proven commodity risk management programs, including comprehensive IRMP, to clients dealing with the following commodities and financial risks: bean oil, bio-diesel, canola, cocoa, coffee, corn, cotton, cotton seed meal, cotton seed oil, crude oil, currencies, foreign exchange, dairy products, diesel fuel, distillers, grains, edible beans, electricity, ethanol, financial instruments, gasoline, home heating oil, jet fuel, livestock, meats, lumber, natural gas, orange juice, propane, soybeans, soy meal, sugar, weather, and wheat.

Key Challenges

FCStone's main challenge was that not all IT staff could restore a complete system if needed. Instead, the IT staff specialized in backing up and restoring specific programs, like SQL, but did not have the expertise to restore the underlying components of a system, like the operating system and specialized configurations. However, this situation put the organization at risk of significant downtime as the company did not have multiple internal resources to restore a complete system. To address this risk, FCStone was looking for a solution that met the following requirements:

1. Ability to restore an entire server, including the operating system and custom configurations
2. Was easy to use, so the entire IT department could restore a system without any specialized training
3. Provided live backups to ensure that day-to-day operations were not interrupted during backup windows

Project Background and Product Evaluation

FCStone considered two other solutions before selecting Acronis True Image. Symantec Ghost Enterprise was evaluated but was not selected because it forced a server reboot to create a backup. FCStone also evaluated CommVault. However, instead of implementing this solution system wide, the company felt that while CommVault was ideal for offsite high-end production machines, it was too in-depth and required more administrative time for simple systems, such as print and file servers. After selecting Acronis True Image, FCStone piloted the software on a test machine. IT staff imaged a production Dell PC with a password protected Acronis image. The image was then restored to a different PC of the same model. The restoration worked smoothly, without any issues; configurations, automated system jobs and the static IP address for the machine were kept intact.

Complete Success

FCStone has successfully implemented Acronis True Image Enterprise Server and Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation. Currently, multiple production machines are running the solution. The implementation was done without any formal training, by reading the user manuals and performing test backups. FCStone is very pleased with the solution, as a system can be restored by any of the individuals on the IT staff in minutes. With the scheduling, log reporting capabilities, and central management console, managing and monitoring backup tasks is easy. FCStone can rest assured that anything from a human resources PC holding confidential information to a custom configured server can be restored in minutes, without the hassle of rebuilding these systems from scratch.