I have been using Altirisic Solutions HIIS (Hardware Independent Imaging Systems) software for quite some time now and love the ease of use and ROI that it provides due to not having to manually load or collect and inject drivers. For those of you who image a lot, know this is the most time consuming portion of getting your machines deployed.
Now that the world has (or in the process of) moved on to Altiris 7.X, HIIS is no longer available and there is another great product from Altrinsic Solutions that fulfills the same process, but BETTER! The new software suite is called "Deploy Expert" and provides a lot more functionality than driver collection/injection.
The DeployExpert (DX) solution seamlessly integrates into the Symantec SMP 7.1 environment presenting administrators with an intuitive GUI that manages a simple 4-step process to automatically perform system hardware inventory analysis, driver pack gathering, task sequence integration and change maintenance.
Step 1 - Analyze Experienced Administrators know that basing your hardware independent image strategy on "OEM model"types is not granular enough - you must know what devices actually exist under the hood in order to know what device drivers are needed for zero touch deployment. For the first time ever, you will see distinct hardware platform groupings that exist in your enterprise. These "Platform Classes" include only systems that are exactly identical based on "under the hood hardware analysis" and therefore capable of sharing a driver pack. Administrators can utilize this information to know what systems are ready for zero touch OS deployment and more importantly what systems are not ready. Step 2 - Harvest No matter what type of drivers are required by any system in your enterprise, DX quickly obtains and maps the best driver for you. DX's Harvest feature allows you to quickly integrate a comprehensive driver pack library that is auto matically customized and mapped to each system, enterprise wide. Even systems that require special peripherals and non-OEM component device drivers are managed. Each unique device driver resource is single-instance stored in DX's driver repository, keeping your driver library lean and easily manageable. Step 3 - Integrate DX seamlessly integrates all required drivers and hardware-specific application intelligence into a Deployment Solution 7.1 job resulting in true "Zero Touch" deployments, making partial deployments and deployment failures a thing of the past. Step 4 - Maintenance DX regularly analyzes the SMP's hardware inventory so that brand new systems and device adds/moves/changes are programmatically added or modified while you sleep. This ensures all systems remain deployment ready.
Step 1 - Analyze
Experienced Administrators know that basing your hardware independent image strategy on "OEM model"types is not granular enough - you must know what devices actually exist under the hood in order to know what device drivers are needed for zero touch deployment. For the first time ever, you will see distinct hardware platform groupings that exist in your enterprise. These "Platform Classes" include only systems that are exactly identical based on "under the hood hardware analysis" and therefore capable of sharing a driver pack. Administrators can utilize this information to know what systems are ready for zero touch OS deployment and more importantly what systems are not ready.
Step 2 - Harvest
No matter what type of drivers are required by any system in your enterprise, DX quickly obtains and maps the best driver for you. DX's Harvest feature allows you to quickly integrate a comprehensive driver pack library that is auto matically customized and mapped to each system, enterprise wide. Even systems that require special peripherals and non-OEM component device drivers are managed. Each unique device driver resource is single-instance stored in DX's driver repository, keeping your driver library lean and easily manageable.
Step 3 - Integrate
DX seamlessly integrates all required drivers and hardware-specific application intelligence into a Deployment Solution 7.1 job resulting in true "Zero Touch" deployments, making partial deployments and deployment failures a thing of the past.
Step 4 - Maintenance
DX regularly analyzes the SMP's hardware inventory so that brand new systems and device adds/moves/changes are programmatically added or modified while you sleep. This ensures all systems remain deployment ready.
Among the above, some things that go unnoticed are how the software meticulously places your drivers in separate categories in which they are able to only have ONE copy of each driver rather than the same driver, consuming the same Hard Disk space, over and over and over again for however many model machines may use that driver. You can reduce 50GB of drivers down to a mere 5GB driver repository or less! This also helps when time comes to do you're maintenance schedule and backups.
Are any of you out there using this product yet? If so, any comments? IF NOT - What is your Hardware Independent solution?