Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced that Gérard Darel, the leading French designer and global retailer of mid to high-end women’s ready-to-wear clothing and leather goods, has selected Acronis® vmProtect™ backup and disaster recovery software to ensure reduced recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for the virtual infrastructure of its corporate headquarters, protecting more than 300 virtualized workstations and 100 virtualized servers.

Following a successful brand awareness campaign and the expansion of retail outlets all over the world, Gérard Darel’s IT department faced new challenges managing huge influxes of data. In particular, the company needed to better safeguard business continuity by ensuring the availability of critical data to employees and protecting data against natural disasters and human error. This involved guaranteeing the protection of its digital assets, located on more than 300 virtualized workstations and 100 virtualized servers throughout the company’s network.

Under the leadership of Samuel Chemouni, Technical Director at Gérard Darel, the organization has been relying on VMware virtualization technology for four years. While the cost and efficiency benefits of virtualization were clear to the company’s IT department, Chemouni realized that his backup and recovery provisions were inadequate to protect a virtualized infrastructure.

After vigorous testing of several products, Gérard Darel chose Acronis vmProtect as a comprehensive virtual backup and recovery solution. Chemouni explained: “During the testing of Acronis vmProtect, we found that the backup process only took a few clicks and was completed in less than 5 minutes. This was without any prior training of the team or any contact with Acronis for support. Compared to its competitors, Acronis vmProtect proved to be the easiest to use, the fastest for recovery and the most efficient solution.”

Acronis vmProtect is optimized to protect a VMware vSphere environment, including servers and workstations, without the need for in-depth IT training. It also backs up on a regular basis and quickly restores data and machines through imaging, replication and BMR capability.

“The software is intuitive and offers a full range of functionalities. It perfectly suits our needs and includes everything needed to launch a backup plan, providing IT managers with peace of mind,” concluded Chemouni. “Acronis vmProtect is the leading backup and recovery product of 2012. To date, no other solution on the market has proven to be as easy-to-use and efficient for the protection of our virtual machines.”

Laurent Dedenis, President, Worldwide Sales at Acronis commented, “We have customers all over the world who faced similar management challenges to those at Gérard Darel. vmProtect helps them to simplify their processes and accelerate their ability to keep critical data and systems available at any time.”

To learn more, watch the video here or read the case study here.

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of next generation data protection and disaster recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. With Acronis’ backup, disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users can better protect and maintain availability of critical servers and data to achieve recovery point (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) while reducing total cost of ownership. With over a decade of investment in research and development, Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis

Acronis^® and vmProtect™ are registered trademarks of Acronis International GmbH. in the United States and/or other countries.