Builder's 6000-PC national network

case study | Thiess
MANAGING a fleet of more than 6000 desktop and notebook PCs is a big task for any technology department, but when those PCs are spread across some of the most remote parts of Australia, the job gets a whole lot tougher.

At construction company Thiess, IT support staff needed to streamline the way company desktops were being installed and managed.

Because users could be anywhere from a Queensland road construction site to an outback mining operation, doing the task remotely was important.

Thiess infrastructure manager Richard Moran says the company had traditionally distributed its standard operating environment (SOE) by burning the operating system and applications to CDs and sending them to all locations.

This worked well for some years, but it reached the point that the IT department realised it needed a different approach.

"We were ending up with some staff using the original SOE CD that they received when they first joined the company but there had been four of five iterations since then," Moran says. "This didn't do a lot to ensure consistency across the company." Crunch time came when the company found it could no longer fit a standard SOE suitable for all hardware on a single CD and it had to create four different versions.

"We were already having logistics issues with distribution when we had only one CD, so having four did not make this any easier," he says.

Step one was to start using Systems Management Server software from Microsoft.

This is designed to streamline the deployment of software and patches to large fleets of PCs in different locations.

"It gave us a semi-automated software deployment capability," Moran says. "A user could request an application and, after the licence was approved, the application could then be downloaded directly to the user's machine."

That improved things to a degree, but it still required a large amount of manual intervention, so Thiess sought ways to enhance the system.

Working with integrator Dimension Data, Thiess installed some extra software and used "some intellectual property" to get the SMS system to do more.

Moran says the company reached the point where the standard operating environment (SOE) was abstracted from the underlying hardware and drivers needed for individual machines.

That meant the SOE could be created once with the automated system, and each PC would receive the drivers it required.

"You can say, for example, that you want Windows XP with Office and a particular antivirus package and some other business applications.

"Whether that is installed on an Hewlett-Packard desktop or a Dell desktop or some other laptop, the SOE is the same."

For Thiess, the difference is dramatic. IT help staff are freed to focus on other, more valuable activities and staff receive fully configured PCs much more quickly. "We can now do a bare-metal build on a PC remotely," Moran says.

"On some sites there may not be an on-site IT professional, but with this system we can deploy software to them. They don't have to wait for someone to turn up on-site to do it."

The new system also automates the task of moving users from one desktop to another, Moran says.

All locally stored files can be automatically backed up over the network and then installed on a new machine.

This will be particularly useful when the company begins a large scale rollout of Microsoft Vista later this year, he says.

THE PROBLEM
Managing a standard operating environment on a fleet of more than 6000 PCs used in multiple remote locations.

THE PROCESS
Microsoft Systems Management Server was installed to create a single SOE independent of the underlying hardware, and to automate the distribution process.

THE RESULT
All PCs can be maintained remotely, and new machines can be built from bare metal as required.