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August 07, 2008

Major US Construction Company Leverages $200,000 Savings With Acronis

Tempe, Arizona-based Sundt Construction initially bought an Acronis^® True Image TM backup and recovery solution to protect its 17 Citrix^® servers, but boosted its savings to six figures when it virtualized these and other servers.

Sundt Construction, one of the 100 largest building contracting companies in the United States, serves private and public clients with general contracting, construction management and design-build projects that range from $50,000 to $200 million. Founded in 1890, Sundt gained its reputation for accepting challenging assignments for both Federal agencies and private businesses alike. One of the most famous of them: disassembling England's iconic London Bridge in the 1970s and reconstructing it in Arizona.

Sundt runs dozens of high-profile projects throughout the southwestern United States that depend on the skills of a compact and agile IT staff headed by IT manager Zach Croxford. They publish line-of-business applications at their Tempe data center on 17 Citrix servers. These are accessed by 700 laptops and 100 desktop systems operating in Tempe, the California cities of San Diego, Sacramento, and Novato; Dallas, Texas, and 50 job sites.

The production servers run a business-critical SQL-based Prolog project management application as well as a Primavera engineering management application, an Exchange e-mail server, a JDE ERP/accounting platform, and estimating software from MC². File services (estimates, bid packages, and construction drawings), the lifeblood of daily operations, take up much of the by 60 terabytes (TB) of SAN-managed disk space and another 10 TB of DAS-based storage found within Sundt's total server count of 80 physical and 25 virtual servers.

Pressing IT concerns

Not long ago, Croxford became concerned that if there was a data center failure in Sundt's Tempe data center, his team would need a better way to get any one of their 17 Citrix servers up and running in the company's disaster recovery site. Croxford sought a solution that wouldn't force his team through a rebuild process that could take hours to complete. He also needed to accelerate recovery of critical line-of-business applications to dissimilar, remotely located hardware in minutes, rather than hours or days.

Sundt needed a comprehensive solution that would:

create a full image backup of the operating system, applications, user settings and data,
support physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual restorations and
offer both incremental and differential backups.

Croxford found such a solution in Acronis True Image Enterprise Server (with the separately available Acronis Universal Restore, used for bare metal restores to dissimilar hardware) after hearing about it from a colleague who had implemented a similar solution at Motorola. "I figured if an Acronis solution works at Motorola — a much bigger environment — then it could also work in our environment," Croxford says.

Acronis proves its ability to restore to dissimilar systems

Sundt evaluated Acronis True Image Enterprise Server against just one major alternative: Symantec's Ghost software. The IT team was skeptical at first about the advantage Acronis claimed over Ghost: the ability to recover to dissimilar hardware. Like most organizations, Sundt could not justify the purchase of identical "dark" systems that would be ready to go in the case of a server failure. "If our production servers were lost in a disaster, we would have to be able to restore quickly to dissimilar hardware from our daily and weekly backups, so that's one of the first things we tested," Croxford says.

In its tests, Croxford's team was able to take an image of a Windows server running on a Dell PE2950 server and restore it on a PE2650 server which had very different specifications. "Sure enough it worked," Croxford says. "It's nice that we weren't forced to find the same exact hardware configuration. We were able to restart on the second machine in minutes." Based on that result, the company placed an order and took delivery in December 2007.

Virtual Server migration boosts savings

The software immediately earned the respect of the IT team for its ability to save administrative time and speed the team's backup and recovery efforts. But the team's mandate to find new ways to protect its data resources soon translated to considerable savings as well.

"Virtualization is a hot topic these days and it falls in line with a server decommissioning initiative I have," Croxford explains. Sundt's 17 production servers were each costing approximately $5000 a year for hardware/software maintenance and the cost of applying patches. This added up to an $85,000 liability. The IT team looked for a way to:

lower the total cost of server ownership,
use existing servers more efficiently, and
increase overall operational efficiency.

Sundt chose to consolidate using VMware, the global leader in virtualization solutions, and it leveraged its Acronis True Image purchase by taking advantage of the software's ability to dramatically speed the company's move toward a virtual server configuration.

Just two days to convert 17 servers!

In the first of its "P2V" — physical-to-virtual — conversion projects, Sundt targeted its 17 Citrix line-of-business servers for consolidation onto just four VMware host servers. It began by taking an image of a physical machine, creating a new virtual machine (VM) in Virtual Center, and booting the VM using an Acronis Universal Restore ISO image file. Then it was just a matter of pointing the universal restore agent to the image file and restoring it on a new VMware ESX machine. Four ESX servers were installed in June, 2008, and they replicate the image files from a production storage area network (SAN) to the company's disaster recovery SAN.

After the servers were virtualized, the company scripted the image process and the conversion to VMware VMDK file format. Now, if the data center in Tempe ever goes off line, Sundt will have VMDK files ready to go on another machine networked onto the disaster recovery SAN.

The entire conversion from 17 to four servers took place in only two days. "It was an awesome conversion," Croxford reports. "We were able to cut over to the virtual servers, mounted on the ESX machines, during normal business hours at a rate of eight or nine a day without disrupting anyone's work." The initial annual cost savings estimated from this conversion are estimated at $65,000 to $73,000.

Savings continue

The IT team continues to work on decommissioning other servers. With Acronis' help, Sundt has already decommissioned about 50 servers this year, saving an estimated $200,000 annually through a combination of attrition and by deploying VMware on four physical servers. The company will save more later this year when it acquires Acronis True Image Virtual Edition. With a unique pricing structure designed to encourage the movement to virtual servers, the IT team will be able to back up, restore, or test five or more virtual servers on a single, physical server for a one-expense price.

With Acronis’ help, Sundt has already decommissioned about 50 servers this year, saving upwards of $200,000 annually.

In addition, Croxford says the company can readily reuse its older decommissioned servers, using them like appliances because Acronis makes it so easy to image several machines at a time as spares. Whenever a server is taken offline for repairs, a spare can be plugged and run in its place without further setup. Reflecting on this and his other experiences with Acronis True Image, Croxford says, "Acronis is an excellent fit in our IT environment. It's proved its worth and plays a vital role in our disaster recovery plan."