Sun International has licensed Ghost Software`s system replication tool, Ghost, as its solution of choice for its nationwide system upgrade project. Distributed by Server Tools, Ghost was supplied by Alliance Data, an authorised Server Tools reseller.
According to group facilities manager Mike Robinson, the upgrade will encourage increased productivity by taking advantage of new technology.
"Over the past few months, we have identified a need for groupwide IT standards in our organisation," he says. "We are therefore standardising on the Microsoft platform, moving from a DOS-based environment to Windows 95, and from older office productivity tools to Office."
Robinson says new recruits are invariably trained on Microsoft products. "Skills for alternative products are diminishing, especially in this country where the skills drain is a serious concern," he says. "In addition, support for older applications is almost non-existent, so a move to Microsoft made good business sense to the company."
With 23 sites in southern Africa, some in remote locations, the company needed a way to maintain a consistent upgrade platform without jeopardising its distributed IT infrastructure. 17 of the sites have been successfully upgraded, taking the total number of licensed workstations to over 2 500.
"The beauty of Ghost is its ability to replicate multiple workstations quickly," says Robinson. "Once we develop a profile and policy for a standard workstation, the software goes to work automatically."
Within a month of testing and configuring Ghost for the project, the implementation time was slashed by 88%, from one hour to seven minutes per workstation.
"That`s a time saving of 53 minutes per workstation," says Robinson. "Given the number of upgraded sites, we`ve saved in excess of 1 700 hours."
Before a workstation can be cloned, Ghost creates an image of that workstation that includes its low-level partitioning information, file system information, user-defined settings and operating system parameters. Ghost is compatible with almost any desktop operating system. Sun International`s testing with Windows 98 also proved positive, although the company is not planning to migrate to the platform.
A clean workstation can then be booted using the Ghost-generated start-up disk, which connects the workstation to the Ghost server and initiates the cloning process.
"We use a two-man team per site, which is generous given the automation of the process," says Robinson. "Ghost requires minimal human intervention, which allows us to use our valuable IT skills elsewhere."
Every hotel has its own IT team responsible for the maintenance of its IT infrastructure. Ghost is installed on a dedicated on-site server, which overcomes the logistics of connecting each site to a central server.
"Ghost was easy to distribute to remote sites using e-mail or the Internet, which was far cheaper than sending a team out to each of our hotels," says Robinson. "Once installed, it was intuitive enough for our teams to image their own workstations without any training or time-consuming testing."
Sun International has licensed each of its machines, and intends to purchase more licences as and when the need arises. The project has been broken up over a two-year period, older hardware to be phased out to make way for the new standard.
"We evaluated several products prior to launching the project, but none could match the efficiency and versatility of Ghost," concludes Robinson. "This was our first attempt at a major upgrade, and it`s been completely straightforward."
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