Cape Technikon has standardised on Symantec`s Ghost to help ease IT maintenance. The system replication tool, distributed in South Africa by Server Tools, is used to "clone" clean, working machines periodically at the technikon`s labs, keeping them updated and free of software and hardware corruption.
Cape Technikon has four academic faculties, each with its own dean, and divided into 10 schools offering more than 70 National Diploma courses and more than 30 Btech courses.
"Frequent Windows NT and 95 training is fraught with configuration problems and application failures," says software technician Hennie Pretorius. "Ghost helps us wipe the slate clean on a weekly basis so students are assured of machines working properly when they arrive at lectures."
With education budgets as low as they are, maintenance overheads are a drain on the limited resources of most education institutions. These costs increase as technology gains in complexity and as more machines are added to meet the demand of information-hungry curricula.
"Monitoring 300 to 350 machines across seven labs is almost impossible without failsafe tools," says Pretorius. "Using our central network and Ghost`s multicasting features, multiple machines can be cleaned in a fraction of the time it previously took to troubleshoot just one." Ghost can be installed on a standalone network server or on a peer-to-peer network. It creates an "image" of a working machine - including operating system parameters, installed software and hardware drivers - that can be used to create a "clone" of itself on any other machine irrespective of file system, hard disk size or existing partitions.
"Instead of formatting and reloading a machine from scratch, which could take up to five hours depending on its configuration, Ghost creates a working machine in minutes," says Pretorius. "It makes sense when you consider a machine is ready to work as soon as it`s cloned since it retains the software and hardware settings of the original."
Pretorius says Ghost was chosen for its speed and reliability, its native Windows NT compatibility, and its robustness in mixed platform environments.
"It`s the only solution that works natively with NT, can create a bit-by-bit image of a hard drive`s contents, correctly image open files with or without long file names and is not limited by hard disk partitions or sizes," says Pretorius. "Ghost is fast enough to clone 42 machines in under 20 minutes, and easy enough to use with little experience."
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