As the world comes to grips with the recent tragic events in America, so too are global IT systems slowly recovering. Not only have the attacks taken the lives of many, but they have left companies crippled, with vital information lost forever.
Unfortunately, the events have highlighted the critical role of disaster recovery. Indeed, effective disaster recovery ensures that far less valuable time is spent on recovering important company information, as well being cost effective.
Neill Rosenthal, Symantec product manager at network distributor Comztek, comments that although many organisations do pay attention to disaster recovery, this tends to be focused only on mission-critical systems, such as servers.
"Rightfully so", he says, "but workstations tend to be at the end of the disaster recovery priority list."
While many workstations may not contain important data, it nevertheless requires considerable time and effort to re-deploy and re-configure the new workstations.
"PC management tools such as Symantec`s Ghost Corporate Edition can play an important part in any workstation disaster recovery plan," says Rosenthal.
The basis of Ghost Corporate Edition is a cloning function that creates an image file containing all of the information required to re-create a complete disk or partition. This essentially means that the image file acts as a `snap shot` of a model system configuration. (A model system configuration is a computer with all the necessary software installed and configured.)
He explains: "A number of image files can be created corresponding to the different workstation configurations in an organisation. This image file is cloned onto one or more disks. The multicasting functionality then extends the cloning process to multiple computers over a network. Deployment time is reduced significantly especially when a large number of workstations is involved."
The `Move the User` function in Ghost Corporate Edition saves and restores users` personal settings. A user can therefore start working on a new workstation that is already set to his or hers personal preferences.
Automatic backups of specific client computers can also be done using Ghost- this would typically be done for users that store important data on their workstations. A time and frequency for backing up a computer are defined.
"Symantec`s Ghost Corporate Edition is a versatile product that can prove its worth as part of a disaster recovery solution, but its full functionality can also be exploited to reduce time and cost in maintaining networked PCs," concludes Rosenthal.
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