Symantec Ghost for Backup and Deployment
I wanted to to tell a story about a customer I assisted. I feel that this story is a good example of what our software can do. The customer is real, but the the name Laura is not here actual name.
-RN
The Customer
I am a technician supporting the Ghost Solution Suite, and I want to share the story of one of my customers, who I will call Laura. Laura was the primary IT person of a community college. Like many of our customers, she had unique needs that she was previously meeting through a combination of tools and practices set up by her predecessors. She needed a tool that could both backup and deploy images to machines. I believe Laura's story reflects how the Symantec choice, Ghost Solution Suite, can be versatile and meet the challenges posed by our varied customers and their unique environments.
The Challenge
The majority of our IT person Laura's end users were students, as expected for an institution of learning. Many community colleges are technology intensive, focusing on technical degrees including computer science. She needed to be able to set up environments for her users that had software requisite to their study, and be able to do so reliably and quickly. As anyone who has taken classroom instruction with computers can tell you, it is very easy to turn a test machine into paperweight incapable of anything. Previously, she was using Novell ZENworks for deploying images to labs of test machines. The process she inherited to do this required deploying the images to each lab, and then manually running Sysprep on each machine to change the unique Security Identifier (SID), a requirement for these machines to be on the same Windows network. She had student lab assistants wait until a deployment was finished and visit each machine with a USB thumb drive containing Microsoft Sysprep and a custom answer file, running it on each machine in turn. This is hardly an efficient use of resources!
A Better Deployment Solution
I demonstrated to her that with Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, base images could be recreated that incorporate the changes made by Microsoft Sysprep. Together we imported the Microsoft-distributed executables into Ghost, along with her custom Sysprep answer file. We created a custom Image Create Task that applied this configuration, so that she could create an image that ran this automatically and startup into Windows. The ability to do this saved Laura a great deal of time and resources, and, according to her, this alone was worth migrating for! But she also had other end users to satisfy.
At-risk Data
She also had the needs of the faculty and administration to contend with. This college's instructors and staff had their own machines with important data that needed backing up. Any IT person can tell you that data not backed up is at-risk data; only redundancy of precious files can ensure that they are there when needed. Laura's previous method was effective, but not efficient, requiring a significant amount of downtime for the faculty machines, as well as individual attention for each machine requiring backup. She was unable to schedule these backups to protect her instructors' and administrators' data, and as a result, sometimes situations occurred where data was lost. Enter Ghost!
Backup Regimes
A demonstration of the Backup Regime feature was all it took for our client to see the power of this software suite. Backup Regimes enable each computer to have its own scheduled task for automating data hard disk backup. Integration with the Windows Scheduler allows this to be performed in a regular maintenance window convenient for each user. To marry efficiency with convenience, this feature also allows the creation of incremental snapshots. Incremental snapshots of data allow the backup of only data that has changed since the previous full image, called a baseline image. Incremental backup of machines allows the Ghost Console to make better use of the space allocated for data backup. In our customer's environment, storage space was limited and this allowed her use it to better advantage.
The Symantec Advantage
Laura's story is an excellent example of how Symantec solutions can deliver elegant and efficient functionality, even when the environment is not ideal. The challenges that Laura faced as the only dedicated IT person in her organization were many, and the Ghost Solution Suite was able to streamline a lot of the labor-intensive practices established by her predecessor. Being able to schedule the backup of critical data in a complex environment and deploy workstations was Laura's primary focus, and we were able to customize the versatile Ghost Solution Suite to meet those needs. Needless to say, our IT person Laura hung up the phone a happy customer!
Lessons for Other Technicians
As was shown here with Laura, it is very important to understand your customer's environment. Taking the time to understand the nuances of a customer's setup is sometimes the differences between a good solution and a great one. I encourage other Symantec Technical Support people to take the time to listen to the needs of our customers and really put your knowledge to use for the customer!