IBM Computer, Laptops and Servers

"Acronis is proud that our disaster recovery software is finding new ways to enhance the security of the United States government and our military, " said Acronis燙EO燱alter燬cott. "We are expanding our sales into a variety of civilian agencies and government branches, including the燯.S. House爋f燫epresentatives and various Executive Branch agencies, as well as virtually all branches of the military. This agreement with Ace燙omputers, a prime government contractor, gives us entree into additional military applications." laptop battery

Ace Computers was founded in 1983 and its headquarters is in Arlington Heights, IL. Ace is a seasoned IT player and is a VARBusiness "Top?00" member, ranked as the 16th largest systems builder in the nation. Ace can be reached by calling 877-ACE-COMP (877-223-2667) or by visiting www.acedigitalhome.com. thinkpad

Deployment tool allows deployment to different hardware, supports 64-bit Windows OS June 6, 2006, Burlington, MA

- Acronis, Inc., the technological leader in storage management software, has updated its system and software deployment application, Acronis Snap Deploy?.0, adding features that make the deployment process even more flexible. The product now includes Acronis' state-of-the-art technology that allows the IT manager to deploy systems with dissimilar hardware simultaneously. The product, which also offers 64-bit Windows support, now makes it faster than ever for an IT manager to deploy a single software configuration to dozens or thousands of systems simultaneously, regardless of hardware, significantly reducing IT costs and improving productivity. microsoft

Among the updates to Acronis Snap Deploy?.0 are: laptop computers

• Acronis Universal Deploy - Complete deployment flexibility by ensuring that image can be restored to any hardware or virtual machine laptop computer

• 64-bit Windows support - Use one application for both new and old systems desktop computer

• Customizable deployment options: notebooks

• Target disk utilization - allows the IT manager to deploy a master image as is keeping the same disk size as on a master machine or using the entire had disk on the target PC by resizing the image to match the new hard disk lenovo

• Post-deployment operations - allows the IT manager to choose what action should be performed on the target mach after the deployment is completed hard drive

• New media builder - IT managers can use the media build feature effectively to build three types of media: an ISO image that can be burned to a CD, DVD or disk drive; a bootable configuration that can be placed on an a Microsoft Remote Installation Server, and multiple configurations that can be burned onto a single CD that can be used for deploying various systems travelstar

• Enhanced Acronis PXE Server - IT managers now can specify the default configuration and timeout after which the configuration will begin to boot gateway

"IT departments today need to be more nimble than ever before, " said Walter Scott, CEO of Acronis. "Downsizing over the past few years has left fewer technical staffers to deal with a greater number of systems, both physical and virtual. Acronis understands the challenges IT departments face today, particularly in large enterprises where infrastructures have grown while the size of the IT staffs have diminished. Acronis Snap Deploy makes the IT manager's job less complex and reduces costs by making it easier to deploy new systems and get new employees productive." laptop parts

"Acronis Snap Deploy?.0 certainly came to the rescue of the Manpower office in Calgary, Alberta, " said Mike Armstrong, IT Technician. "We operate six week training sessions for approximately 18 potential employees where we teach them to run various computer applications, " "At the end of the class, we have to have each of the 18 computers back to a pristine condition so that the next class will be able to go through the training. Prior to using Acronis Snap Deploy, preparing each computer was a long, labor-intensive process that ran well into the night, impacting our IT department's productivity. software

"Acronis allowed us to automate the multicasting of a new image to each machine so that now we can prepare for a new class in just a matter of minutes, " he continued. "The time savings is significant and allows us to be far more productive. As a company that built its business on making its clients more productive, we see this as an ideal solution for IT managers who need to deploy images to multiple systems on a regular basis. Acronis has far exceeded our expectations." hard drives

List price for quantity 1 Acronis Snap Deploy?.0 is $19.99. List price for Acronis Universal Deploy is $9.99. Each system to be deployed requires its own license. Volume discounts are available. The products are currently being shipped. electronics

Education Market learns a lesson from Acronis Universities and K-12 School system adopt Acronis disk imaging and partitioning products for easy, cost-effective data management. Among the newest members of the Acronis family are Greenville College and Brown University, both of which implemented Acronis True Image to ensure speedy recovery of their software systems. Universities and K-12 School System Adopt Acronis Disk Imaging and Partitioning Products for Easy, Cost-Effective Data Management MICROSOFT TECH-ED (BOOTH #935), BOSTON, MA. (JUNE 12, 2006)

- Acronis, Inc., the technological leader in storage management software (http://www.acronis.com), announced that it is expanding its reach in the education market. The company, which already boasts a number of colleges, universities and public school systems as customers, said it has added several additional schools to its family of customers that purchased its disk imaging and partitioning software to simplify IT management. canon

Among the newest members of the Acronis family are Greenville College and Brown University, both of which implemented Acronis True Image to ensure speedy recovery of their software systems. The Centennial School District in suburban Philadelphia has implemented Acronis Disk Director Server to maximize mission-critical server usage. desktop pc

Greenville College Streamlines Cloning System Process

Greenville College, a four-year accredited Christian liberal arts school with more than 1, 300 students in Greenville, IL, licensed Acronis True Image and recently purchased Acronis Snap Deploy to update and streamline its existing process for cloning systems. The college, which purchased 400 licenses, now can image and clone computer systems on campus without the need to worry about whether existing hardware, such as Ethernet network cards, are supported on the new systems. desktop computers

"We have been using Acronis True Image for over a year, and recently started using Acronis Snap Deploy, " said Dan S. Wolfe, support technician at the Greenville College IT Help Desk. "In researching imaging solutions, we did not find any as fast or easy to use as Acronis. It now takes just a couple minutes to backup or restore a system over our network, instead of an hour or more. Because it utilizes Linux, we don't have to worry about finding Ethernet drivers for our systems anymore." think pad

Brown University Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies

Brown University, based in Providence, RI, is a member of the Ivy League and the seventh oldest university in America. Recently Brown's Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies switched to the Acronis True Image family of backup and disaster recovery products after it determined that corporate needs were not being met by its existing Fortune 1000 vendor. The center had three key requirements for its Windows 2003 Servers: Improve the center's disaster recovery in terms of total cost of ownership; improve the return on investment; and improve the efficiency of restoration (EOR). repair

If you have a reasonable amount of space in your centralized storage, that's most likely the best repository for your desktop or laptop backups. Putting the data there lets you leverage the backup resources you already have in place. data recovery

Products such as Symantec's NetBackup, EMC Corp.'s Retrospect Server and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager all facilitate centralized management and provide local clients for virtually any operating system. A far cheaper, albeit less elegant, solution for smaller businesses is to provide network shares and use readily available desktop backup programs. There are competent backup applications for every operating system, and many of them are free. cisco

Local Network Storage

Network-attached storage (NAS) more properly falls under the heading of backing up across the network, but it deserves a separate mention simply because it's a superior method for smaller shops and workgroups. But there's a false impression that it's expensive. Easily configurable single-drive NAS boxes from Maxtor Corp., Western Digital Corp. and others are priced well under $1 per gigabyte. Most also allow expansion via USB direct-attached drives for an even lower cost per gigabyte. A $300 drive that's physically isolated and used with some scheduled backups is a pretty cheap way to ward off time-wasting re-creation procedures. keyboard

Back Up Online

If you're supporting a large operation with a WAN and off-site repositories, chances are you also have a virtual private network (VPN) and automated clients. Those are useful resources. Gerry Maddalozzo, a networking consultant in San Francisco, recalls his days at : "Whether I was in Sao Paolo or Singapore, logging in via a VPN to automatically offload vital data from my laptop to a safe location was both convenient and reassuring." For large-scale backup, this is the best way to go. monitor

For smaller companies, an online backup service can provide both off-site safety, worldwide access and redundancy. Kevin Railsbeck, director of IT at InfoWorld magazine, a sister publication of Computerworld, chose Iron Mountain Inc.'s Connected Data Protector for his backup needs. "Online backup, specifically Connected, was the only option that allowed us to provide the same reliability and quality of backups for all of our users, both in-the-office and remote workers, " he says. "Also, they were the only provider of full-system backup over the network when we chose them in early 2002." desktop

There are many other business-oriented online choices, including Backup.com's @Backup, Acpana Business Systems Inc.'s Data Deposit Box, AmberWave Communications' FirstBackup, Intronis LLC's ESureIT, Iomega Corp.'s IStorage Online and NovaStor Corp.'s Online Backup Service, as well as products from AmeriVault Corp., DataVault Inc., Register.com and SwapDrive Inc. infosys

Local Storage Do's and Don'ts

A strategy that provides shared local hardware but leaves users on their own is hardly optimal. But it can be modestly effective if you educate users about the need for backing up. Users are more comfortable backing up with hard drives than tape or optical media for a number of reasons: fear of disk swaps and tape rewind, bad memories of melted cassette tapes and so on. refurbished laptops

As a matter of fact, users tend to be too comfortable with external hard drives, not realizing that the backup drive is just as likely to fail as the drive it's backing up. If you're providing external hard drives, require or encourage rotation. A secondary internal hard drive, while subject to the same box-scale physical dangers as the primary drive, is a hedge against drive failure and malware attacks and avoids the threat of ham-handed employees. wipro

Despite the affinity many users feel for hard drives, a baseline backup to removable, storable CD or DVD is the appropriate first step for local backup. Hint: It's an easier sell if you tell users they need to do it only once. Just make sure they don't skip verification. The best practice is to provide a safe location for storing these backups, and they ideally should be cataloged by IT. lap top

If you decide on or are forced into a backup strategy that leaves users on their own, don't fail to educate them on backup do's and don'ts. Some users think they're safe backing up data to a different folder on the same partition. refurbished

Even experienced users may fail to recognize the need for redundancy, rotating backups, password protection/encryption and simply backing up often enough. Better than education is education and assisted implementation - install or configure a local backup program for them that will run hands-off in the background. Spending 10 to 20 minutes now can save your department hours in the long run. memory

Continuous Backup

If the data on a workstation or laptop is revision-intensive or constantly evolving, continuous backup is well worth considering. CDP is a hot feature these days and can be found in products such as Atempo Inc.'s LiveBackup/LiveServ and Tivoli Storage Manager and NetBackup. CDP on the desktop has become almost a boom market since vendors discovered Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service. NewTech Infosystems Inc.'s Shadow and Stardock Corp.'s KeepSafe, which back up designated files as they are saved or at frequent intervals, are just two examples. IBM has even broken out the CDP from Tivoli in order to market it to end users. Most CDP applications can store multiple revisions and, with the autosave feature, create an ad hoc document archiving system. intel

Traditional backup for the desktop, or backing up at the file level, still has many adherents, largely because the major players - Symantec's Backup Exec, EMC's Retrospect and NovaStor's NovaBackup - all offer support for the latest and greatest tape as well as hard drives and optical media. For backing up, you can't beat them, but disaster recovery is more complex and time-consuming than with imaging, though Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service has helped with the problem of backing up open files - a former bugaboo of the traditional approach to backup under Windows. as400

Imaging entire partitions sector by sector is thought of as something you do at the time of deployment, but the simplicity of restoring images continues to win fans. The latest products, such as Symantec's Ghost 10 and Acronis Inc.'s True Image 9.1, address the old complaints about heavy space requirements and unwieldiness by providing both incremental backups and backups of individual files and folders. averatec

With huge amounts of data now living on desktops and laptops, you need a proactive attitude. Back them up; you'll be glad you did. Acronis Press Center Acronis Press Center Press Center Press Releases Reviewer's Guides Media Contacts Image Gallery Media Talk Asia hardware

Five Recovery Apps Bring Your PC Back From The Dead Restoring from a full-system backup has a lot of other advantages over a traditional reinstall: You don't have to reinstall applications, restore user data or accounts, or perform tricky end-runs around the system to do things like recover protected data. Everything comes back in one fell swoop.

Bare-metal recovery is also one of the biggest features missing from Windows itself. There's no native way to make a system-wide backup and then restore it in one step if things go wrong. Granted, Windows has some nice incremental recovery options (System Restore comes to mind), and a decent file-and-directory backup tool, but no built-in way to restore everything at once. Sure, Microsoft has promised a full system-recovery function in Windows Vista, but upgrading to Vista is still a long way off for many people - and for some it's not an option at all. What can we do now about the problem dual xeon

To that end, a number of third-party software makers have stepped in and provided software solutions of their own. In this round-up, I review five of them - from Symantec's latest revision of Norton Ghost (now Norton Backup and Restore) to the light but useful Image for Windows. All of these applications have the basic ability to back up and restore an entire system disk without needing to boot to Windows, and can restore to and from a variety of backup media - usually attached hard drives or CD/DVD-Rs. storage

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