When it comes to rolling out tens or hundreds of PCs, the issues you need to consider are considerably different to buying a PC for home or a SOHO. As always, cost is an important factor, but here's where the similarity ends.
High-end graphics and audio subsystems might be great for playing games or DVDs, but are an unnecessary expense and distraction in an office environment where the majority of employees use nothing more taxing than a word processor, spreadsheet, or Web browser.
Deployment and management issues are also vital. Installing the OS and applications on more than a few PCs can be incredibly time consuming. For large corporate rollouts, an SOE (standard operating environment) can be an enormous time saver. Centralised management software also becomes essential.
Central management software
The Desktop Management Interface (DMI) is an interface that manages and keeps track of hardware and software components from a central location. DMI was created to automate system management for large numbers of computers.
DMI is hardware and operating system independent, which means it's easy for vendors to adopt. It's also mappable to existing management protocols such as SNMP.
DMI consists of four components:
- Management Information Format (MIF): An MIF is a text file that contains specific information about the hardware and software being used on a computer. An MIF file consists of attributes, which describe each of the components being used.
- Management Interface (MI): The MI communicates with the SP and allows applications to directly access, manage, and control desktop systems, components, and peripherals.
- Service Provider (SP): The SP collects information from products and manages the information in the MIF database. It also passes the information to management applications via the MI and between itself and manageable components via the CI.
- Component Interface (CI): The CI is an application program interface that sends status information to the appropriate MIF file via the SP. Some of the commands include the Get and Set command that modifies the MIF as needed and the Event command that notifies management software of critical events.
There are many software suites on offer that help you manage your PCs and software images from a central location. Compaq for example offers a chain of access on demand applications that can monitor your product and check to see if for example someone's hard drive is working outside normal operating conditions.
If a hard drive does appear to be playing up, the software automatically makes a service call and a Compaq specialist comes out to your work site and rectifies the problem.
However, these management systems are also proactive, and attempt to fix small problems before they become big ones. For example, they can delete temp files when a hard disk is getting full. Addressing such problems proactively can increase the productivity levels in your company.
Management software can also keep an eye on what versions of software everyone is using and upgrades can be implemented from a central location. Users only have to restart their PCs for the changes to take place.
There are many levels of management that a customer can make use of; it all depends on budget and requirements. These management systems are becoming ever more powerful and extremely more vital when it comes to managing hundreds of PCs.
Vendors are usually happy to assist in creating disk images to roll out a large number of PCs. All you need to do is give the vendor very specific information about your requirements. The vendor will then create a custom gold master image, which it will hold onto, and use if you order more PCs.
This is great news! but where does one find this software?