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Caveat Cloner! Best Practices for PC Management with Cloning Software
If your hair is falling out, or at least turning prematurely grey, you more than likely manage your organization's PCs. It's a burden that's grown heavier in recent years and today probably includes deploying new PCs, migrating users from one machine to another, restoring unstable platforms, maintaining applications and operating systems, and ensuring that users can be quickly back in the saddle after even the most unexpected discontinuity in operations.
Heterogeneity - a mix of personal computing devices - is the heart of the problem, and diminishing PC life spans have made it worse. Not so long ago, PCs lasted a good three or four years. Nowadays, twelve to eighteen months is more realistic. Such rapid turnover makes standardization on a single PC model economically impracticable for most organizations. The result is the need to support a medley of models and all their disparities of operating system, processor, memory, port availability, drivers, network interfaces, and more. Add to this multiple form factors - desktop, notebook, tablet, and handheld - plus a growing reliance on telecommuters and transient contractors and the management responsibility increases still further.
Security threats posed by worms, viruses, malicious code, and so-called hackers - exact another toll on PC management. Patches - the traditional fix to software vulnerabilities - can't remediate many types of virus and spyware. And efforts to manually remove such vulnerabilities are often as ineffectual as they are uneconomic. The only reliable solution may be to reformat the user's PC, performing a complete reinstallation of the operating system, drivers, and application software. And as security incursions continue to escalate, the need for ever more frequent reformatting increases accordingly.
Recent assaults, meanwhile, on the London and Madrid subway systems and the destruction of New York's World Trade Center are stark reminders of the threat to an organization's physical security. Likewise for the ravages of hurricanes, floods, quakes, and tsunamis, at once unpredictable and inevitable. Whether victimized by Mother Nature or her human counterpart, organizations clearly need data protection and continuity of operations plans (COOPs) to ensure their survival.
Meanwhile, two additional developments complicate PC management still further: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and new industry regulations. SLAs between IT departments and users are now common practice in establishing standards of service such as network latency and platform stability. And industry regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States and our own European Privacy Directives dictate IT-related controls for financial reporting. Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, requires hardware and software inventory records, documentation of system changes, and audit trails for each system that contributes financial information. Compliance to such regulations is notably more difficult in a heterogeneous environment.
PC Management, BC
In the era BC - that is, Before Cloning - the management of PCs was one of the most labor-intensive responsibilities in most organizations' already over-worked IT department. Deployment of each new PC, for example, demanded a lengthy sequence of steps: erasing and reformatting the hard drive; installing the operating system; installing applications; updating the operating system and applications with the latest patches; locating and installing drivers for auxiliary devices such as printers, web cameras, VoIP-enabled telephones, and portable digital assistants; creating user profiles; customizing the desktop; and configuring network settings.
End to end, these task could easily consume three or more hours of an IT manager's day per machine. Meanwhile, efforts to reformat a PC to its original state, refresh a PC following a platform failure, or migrate a user from one machine to another could be even more laborious, often entailing additional steps such as backing up user data and providing a temporary platform in the interim.
Figure 1: Cloning
With increasing use of cloning solutions, the BC era is rapidly receding into a not-so-fondly remembered past - a past that squandered the time and talents of IT professionals who might otherwise have been more productively employed. Cloning - or Imaging as it is also known - accelerates and at least partially automates the formatting, reformatting, and refreshing of PCs via a two-step process illustrated in Figure 1: First, convert the contents of a hard drive (including the operating system, user preferences, software applications, data, and network configuration settings) into a single file, the so-called Image. Then port this Image, usually via a removable disk or a network connection, to a second PC to create an identical version or clone of the first.[1]
Cloning Solutions
Ghost, the first cloning product, was introduced in 1996 by Binary Research Ltd, an independent New Zealand-based software developer. Following its acquisition by U.S. software giant Symantec Corporation in 1998, Ghost has seen widespread adoption in the United States, where it dominates. The U.S. market, however, is active with competition from Altiris, Novell, Acronis, and IBM, among others. European users, meanwhile, are beginning to adopt cloning solutions in greater numbers as Symantec and rival vendors extend their marketing to this region.
Indeed, competition among cloning products has driven considerable innovation in the decade since the release of Ghost. That first product was exclusively a disk Imaging tool. Today's products, in contrast, are full solution suites including utilities for centralized and remote provisioning, user migration, data back up, asset management, and operational continuity. It's a cradle-to-grave concept for managing PCs from initial deployment to maintenance to recovery to disposal.
IT departments use cloning solutions because they deliver significant productivity gains, relieving staff of hundreds or even thousands of hours cumulatively each year in managing PCs in mid-to-large organizations. This significantly lowers the total cost of PC ownership. Meanwhile, additional utilities that are packaged with cloning solutions deliver other advantages that go beyond the bottom line. One such is support of compliance with industry regulations, a key business concern nowadays. Another is management of software updates to help combat platform and application security risks.
In sum, packaged solutions like Symantec's Ghost offer an irrefutable value proposition. Indeed, after expending untold hours on PC management, you'll be forgiven for tearing open the box and rushing headlong to install the software within. But take heed: IT departments that don't address associated business and technology issues will not realize the full value of their investment in cloning solutions. Worse, they could impede the operations of the users whom they endeavor to serve.
Strategic Planning Considerations
Cloning and Continuity of Operations
Cloning is foremost a strategic concern. That doesn't mean you'll need weeks or months to implement it inside your organization. But it does mean carefully considering cloning in the broader context of continuity planning. Complementary to COOP, cloning can markedly reduce the time for IT managers to restore users' PCs after a discontinuity in operations.
Take a manual restore, for example. Unassisted by cloning software, this can easily consume five hours or more of an IT professional's time per machine. That includes 45 minutes to install the operating system, two or three hours to load applications, plus additional time to locate and install drivers, retrieve back-up data, and configure user preferences, passwords, and network settings. At such a pedestrian pace, an organization with multiple PCs may be in for a nasty surprise in the wake of a major incident: hours, days, or in some cases weeks of inoperability while IT personnel toil to restore critical PCs. Time enough, indeed, to provoke a crisis in confidence among even the most loyal of customers and shareholders.
Cloning simplifies PC restoration to a single step of porting a previously created image to the user's PC. In ideal circumstances, the process may be complete in ten minutes or less. However, caveat cloner: An Image of one PC may not readily port to a different machine because of driver incompatibilities between the two hardware platforms. An Image of a Dell desktop, for example, won't port to that IBM ThinkPad in the office next door. It might not even port to another Dell if the processors or model numbers differ.
Universal Imaging
Faced with this portability problem, organizations with multiple disparate PCs have had little choice than to create a unique Image for each configuration of desktop and notebook computer. That might mean maintaining two or three dozen Images - an overhead that diminishes the value of cloning software. Moreover, Images are perishable, becoming rapidly out of date with every patch, fix, and operating system update. Any PC cloned from an out-of-date Image will therefore require an extended set-up by an IT professional to make it current.
Fortunately, the Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) solves the problem of Image portability. This remarkable innovation - developed by Big Bang LLC and distributed by Binary Research International - is an enhancement to cloning software, allowing users to deploy a single Windows Image, created using any cloning solution, on any hardware platform regardless of make, model, processor, or configuration.
The UIU works by preparing a master or source PC (a fully configured platform that the user wishes to clone) prior to executing cloning software. Figure 2 illustrates the process. Specifically, the UIU installs on this master an extensive database of drivers. The Image subsequently created by the cloning software will then deploy to virtually any destination PC.
Figure 2: Universal Imaging
Key to this advance is the UIU's database, which contains drivers for more than 35,000 hardware components from systems integrators and OEMs like Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Intel, nVidia, and 3Com. Yet despite the need to accommodate such a comprehensive set of drivers, the database is small enough to fit comfortably on a single CD. Moreover, the UIU continuously updates its stock of drivers, minimizing the chance that an Image will ever lack the requisite drivers for a destination PC. Now organizations need barely skip a beat when challenged by even the most catastrophic of operational discontinuities.
Cloning Schedules
Today's cloning solutions include management consoles to help automate the Imaging process, but the IT department must still decide critical issues like which machines to Image and the frequency of Imaging. In all cases, greatest success will follow from working closely with personnel across the enterprise to create a cloning schedule that reflects the organization's business requirements.
To this end, begin by asking questions: Which PCs are mission critical? Based on the current investment in business continuity, how much time would elapse in order to port Images of these PCs to new hardware? What's the longest acceptable outage? Is the organization's PC environment sufficiently disparate to benefit from the Universal Imaging Utility? What are the costs and benefits of Imaging on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule? How much would the business units be willing to invest to fortify the organization's data protection and business continuity initiatives?
Such questions are not easy to answer. Indeed, business leaders - chief executives, managing directors, and financial officers, for example - may first need education in cloning from the IT department or third-party consultants before they can even make sense of these questions. Moreover, conflicts of interest are likely to emerge between the different constituencies within the organization. That prompts another question: Who is going to balance these interests and build the necessary consensus around an optimal cloning strategy?
Coordination and Staffing
In mid-size and large organizations with hundreds or thousands of PCs, project coordination is a leadership responsibility best fulfilled by the chief information officer, the vice president of operations, or a senior member of the IT department who combines business savvy and technology smarts. A diplomat's touch won't hurt either, for this is the person who'll have to keep his - or, just as likely, her - head when all around are losing theirs.
Project staffing is another consideration. Whereas a cloning application's centralized console reduces the hands-on aspect of PC Imaging, local personnel will still be necessary to perform ad hoc tasks beyond the capabilities of remote management. The net labor savings of using a cloning solution should be substantial, but don't expect cloning utilities to do all the work of PC management.
By the same token, don't underestimate the complexity of project management. In all but the smallest organizations, application software like Microsoft Project can help monitor progress and resource utilization, empowering the coordinator to make informed decisions and keeping the Imaging project on track.
Infrastructure Considerations
System Requirements
Before selecting a cloning solution, take time to conduct an inventory of the PCs you need to clone as well as any servers that might host the cloning software. Today's cloning solutions are often feature-rich application suites with demanding server-side requirements. Legacy PCs, meanwhile, might also struggle to fulfill client-side requirements, perhaps needing a browser update or a network card before they can communicate with the server software.
Symantec's industry-leading Ghost Solution Suite, for example, integrates three PC management applications: Ghost, the principal Imaging application; Client Migration, a utility for migrating PC data and desktop settings; and Deploy Center for deploying operating system and application updates to existing or new hardware.
Minimum server-side requirements to install all three components include a Pentium III processor, 512 MB of RAM, Internet Information Server 5.0 or higher, and a co-located database: MSDE 2000, SQL 7.0, or Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The workstation that hosts the centralized management console must have a 400 MHz Pentium-compatible processor, Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher, and 64 MB of RAM among other requirements. Meanwhile, client-side requirements of each PC include 32 MB of RAM, Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher, and available disk space equal to twice the size of the largest file on the C: drive.
Image Storage
Though often overlooked, storage presents a greater challenge than system requirements for most organizations. The challenge is particularly significant when using cloning for data protection as well as PC management. This means Imaging on a sufficient scale and frequency to back up every PC that hosts mission-critical data.
Even when data protection is not a concern, the number of Images can be sizable, especially in heterogeneous environments. Faced with the need to store and manage multiple Images, organizations will sometimes use the Universal Imaging Utility to substantially reduce the scope of the Image library - sometimes down to a single Image that ports to every PC in the organization.
In another approach to Image reduction, IT managers will create unique Images for each functional group. In this way, an Image for the organization's sales group might conform to one configuration including, say, sales-force automation software, whereas Images for finance, engineering, and customer service will integrate applications and other group-specific settings relevant to that business function. Unlike the creation of multiple Images to accommodate incompatible hardware requirements, these multiple Images are created for reasons that align with the organization.
With such considerations in mind, the project coordinator must assess the options for storing Images. Local storage - that is, storage on another local drive or a drive partition of the client PC - may simplify Image management, make efficient use of unused disk capacity, and avoid the need for connecting the client PC to the corporate network. However, local storage has disadvantages in many COOP scenarios - for example, a fire or some other situation that impedes access to the Image. A more flexible option is storage on removable media such as CDs, DVDs, and USB drives. But this, in turn, may frustrate Image management when numerous versions of out-of-date Images begin to accumulate. A third option is storage in a network-accessible location such as an ATA-based disk array. Though potentially more expensive, network-accessible storage provides instant scalability, superior data protection, and greatest opportunity for centralized and remote PC management.
Network Assessment and User Disruption
Out of sight and out of mind. That's the goal of every well-behaved child and every well-conceived cloning initiative. To this end, consider the impact of deploying a new operating system across several hundred PCs or harvesting Images from every machine. What would that mean for your network? Do you need to access PCs over a Wide-Area Network? Would you be able to disrupt users during the work day? How would you gain access to telecommuters and notebook-toting road warriors?
To help minimize the impact on the network and its users, cloning solutions such as Symantec Ghost support multicasting, a load-minimizing strategy in which routers send data over each link of the network just once. However, the impact may still be considerable unless the organization's routers support IGMP, the Internet Group Management Protocol. IGMP-capable routers can constrain multicast traffic to prevent its interference with other traffic on the network - for example, submissions of urgent print jobs, incoming and outgoing email, and exchanges of data between PC clients and an application service provider.
Organizations that don't have IGMP-capable routers face the choice of either updating their network infrastructure or performing cloning operations during the night or on weekends, when network traffic is usually lighter. An off-peak schedule will also minimize disruption to users when an IT professional needs hands-on access to a user's PC in order to perform certain tasks.
About Binary Research International
Binary Research International has a 15-year heritage in the cloning industry. We trace our origins to the 1991 founding of our predecessor, Binary Research Ltd, the New Zealand-based pioneer in file-transfer technology that introduced Ghost, the original cloning product, in 1996.
Ghost was subsequently acquired by Symantec Corporation, the global leader in maintaining critical IT infrastructure, and today Binary Research International provides sales, training, and support for Symantec Ghost Solution Suite as well as for Big Bang's Universal Imaging Utility and Sprite Software's back-up and cloning products. We also offer consulting services to Ghost users, including project planning, network assessment, deployment, and troubleshooting. Our clients include Lockheed Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Rockwell Automation, Toyota, US Army, British Telecom, NATO, Fujitsu, Coca Cola Beverages, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, DuPont, and the US Air Force.
Binary Research International is headquartered in Glendale, Wisconsin. We operate in Europe through our subsidiary, Binary Resource (UK) Ltd. To learn more about our expertise in cloning, contact:
Binary Research International Inc.
5215 North Ironwood Road
Suite 200
Glendale, Wisconsin 53217
Toll Free: 888.446.7898
Phone: +414.961.7077
Fax: +414.961.1716
www.BinaryResearch.net
Info@BinaryResearch.net
[1.] The Image can also port to space (if available) on the source computer's hard drive.
