Elettronica FM Case Study
Macrium Reflect for fast and reliable backups
The sensitive task of protecting the data from all Windows computers of Elettonica FM has been entrusted to Macrium Reflect.
Elettronica FM S.r.l. is a company that produces circuit boards and electronic devices for third parties.
The company was founded in 1984 and, in addition to its productive capacity, offers a consolidated experience in electronic systems design.
Elettronica FM S.r.l. is about to move to new premises, of 7500 square meters. This will allow them to add more production lines. They currently have around 140 employees and use over 220 personal computers.
In 2015, the CEO Mauro Ferrari decided to build and invest in his home town* by realising the first self-sufficient Class A++ industrial facility, in order to reduce indirect production costs and allow the company to be more competitive in the global market.
Requirements
The company needed be able to restore a great number of personal computers, both for office use and production line control, in case of hardware or software malfunction. Their previous backup software was not able to fulfil this requirement with the same immediacy and simplicity.
The evaluation of other possible solutions lasted over a year. A number of image based backup solutions were tested but the only one that fulfilled all the company’s requirements was Macrium Reflect.
Other solutions, even though they allow the creation of disk images, lacked a central management console or domain integration or they required more resources in order to run.
Even though Macrium Reflect was already known to the company, the Brescia-based reseller Nanosoft suggested the use of Site Manger a free centralized solution for backup management of the PCs in the network.
The sensitive task of protecting the data from all Windows computers of Elettonica FM has been entrusted to Macrium Reflect.
The Macrium Solution
For a company with more than 100 pcs, a mandatory requirement was the availablity of a central management console to manage all the PCs in a domain and have a full feedback on backup operation.
Macrium Site Manager allows the deployment of Agents on all PCs, saving a lot of time for the IT manager of the company.
Thanks to the fact that Macrium Reflect is compatible with any Windows opeating system from Windows XP service pack 3, it was possible to install it in all the machines in the company without exception.
The Results
Thanks to the adoption of Macrium Reflect, Elettronica FM S.r.l. can count on a real-time, centralized monitoring system for periodic backups of all Pcs.
The technical support offered by the reseller, Nanos, was very useful in the initial installation phase to resolve some issues with the communication between the Agents and Site Manager, to understand the reason why there were VSS errors in some cases and to set up the most appropriate configuration for the company needs.
The integrated restore in a new hardware functionality of Macrium Reflect, allows the company to replace malfunctioning machines without the necessity of having the same hardware on the new machine.
When asked if he was satisfied Dr. Gabriele Vaccari answered:
"On a scale from 0 to 10, I would say 7.5 that for my standards is a good degree of satisfaction"
Conclusions
Elettronica FM S.r.l considers that Macrium Reflect works very well for the main purpose it was purchased: to generate image backups and restore them at a later time.
The new console for central management, Macrium Site Manager, with all its functionality and the constant improvements and additions of new features, is without a doubt the tool that turned out to be essential for the use of the product in a complex structure like Elettronica FM S.r.l. with the necessity to manage and to monitor a high number of machines.
