Living in the shadowy world of the pre-boot environment, Diamond Networking Technologies (DNT) has developed software to bring remote management and Internet access to any device that connects to a network.
The pre-boot stage is that period before Windows starts up. Or, more technically, that part of a computer`s start-up that happens after the BOIS has done its Power On Self Test analysis of the computer to see if the basic hardware configuration is working, but before the hard disks are mounted and the file system is loaded to get the computer into an operating system (OS).
Because it is the stage before the OS loads, anything that runs at this point is not limited to a particular vendor`s OS. It also means that, for programmers, there is no room for third and fourth generation languages, like Visual Basic. To communicate with the device, users have to go back to basics and use Assembler.
However, the pre-boot phase also offers numerous opportunities for innovative solutions and management possibilities. Rhys Taylor, DNT sales and marketing manager, highlights two of the company`s solutions that play in this space.
The company`s Virtual Services Provider (VSP) administration and auto-healing technology is a complete set of services for administering and maintaining computers on a network. However, it is the pre-boot element of the software that makes it different.
VSP`s remote control service is able to take over a remote computer in its pre-boot time, which means that even if the disk has totally crashed, the computer can still be accessed. This is the result of a technology embedded on many network cards (NIC) available today called PXE. In effect, this is a standard that allows the type of pre-boot communication that DNT specialises in.
Having remotely connected to a computer, the administrator is able to perform various diagnostic checks to ascertain what the problem is before having to leave his desk. DNT has added to these tools` ease of use with its VSP server, which will automatically diagnose and fix 90% of all faults unattended, getting a user`s system up and running without any human intervention.
When a machine is switched on, the NIC automatically checks in with the VSP server, and if a problem occurs it requests help. This process is repeated regularly after boot to check if any system-critical files have been corrupted or deleted.
Indirectly this also makes it a virus rectification solution, as files corrupted by a virus can be invisibly rolled back.
Taylor says additional network traffic is not a problem as DNT has designed the system so that the largest packet ever sent from the client is 2KB. The network priority of messages is also assigned as low as possible, so that other traffic will be routed before them and they will only be sent when bandwidth becomes available. This means self-healing can be almost invisible to the user.
The company is expanding its self-healing technology with offerings for Exchange servers, as well as a planned VSP-type solution that will work over a modem, allowing Internet service providers to offer remote technical support to subscribers. However, there is no PXE-type standard currently for modem interfaces, so the company is working with Intel to get one ratified.
The other technology that DNT has developed in the pre-boot arena is a pre-boot Internet browser technology called Instant Internet.
This allows any type of device to get a complete Internet Explorer 5 experience of the Web from any type of device. The actual processing and access is done on a server, and all that is sent to the client is an interactive screen update.
For the user, the experience is as rich as a full-blown PC, but means that the client device can be anything from a Palm Pilot or a Pocket PC, to a set-top Internet device. The company says the technology is so compact that it could easily be included in an M-Net decoder.
All the company`s solutions are based on global standard technologies such as XML and Java.
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