Upgrade revolution

Pro

The key to a successful enterprise-wide software upgrade is proper planning. ‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’ says Stephen Ennis, Professional Services Manager at Horizon Open Systems. That’s a view that’s echoed by Harry Largey, Senior Group Manager or Microsoft Ireland’s Enterprise and Partner Group: ‘The job of upgrading shouldn’t be taken lightly. The IT manager needs to show due diligence as to what they are committing to in terms of training, time taken to execute the upgrade and so on.’

‘Any business with 30 or more desktops needs a desktop strategy,’ says Kevin McAteer, Business Development Manager at Novell Ireland.

So what do those three gentlemen, and the companies they represent recommend when it comes to enterprise-wide upgrades.

For Ennis the solution is quite simple. Keep centralised control by using thin appliances on the desktop with all software on a central server. ‘Our philosophy is that the complexity of the infrastructure should be centralised rather than decentralised to the desktop. This gives lower cost of ownership and greater control of costs associated with upgrading and maintaining the infrastructure. Also upgrading a centralised infrastructure is less risky than if the infrastructure is decentralised.’

Ennis’s vision is of what he calls the stateless desktop — essentially a keyboard and screen with no processing power. Instead all of the applications run on the server. ‘Everyone has the same version of the software, it’s properly licensed and when it comes to upgrades the end user has nothing to worry about. From an IT department point of view there is only a single upgrade to do. Users get the next version of the software when and only when the department has verified and tested it and the help desk has only one version to support.’

Extra load on the server

Ennis admits that this will put an extra load on the server, but he points to the fact that the cost of servers is coming down all the time while performance is going up. Couple that, he says with the low cost of the thin appliances on the desktop and it still gives lower total cost of ownership. ‘The other advantage, he says is that in a hot-desking environment, anyone can sit at any desk and have their own environment and files.’

Horizon Open Systems is the representative in this country of Sun Microsystems, so it comes as no surprise to learn that when it comes down to product Ennis recommends the Sun Ray. This comprises the Sun Ray Server as well as an appliance consisting of keyboard, screen and smart card reader. The user logs in by inserting a smartcard. ‘They do not even need to log out,’ says Ennis. ‘They can leave files and applications open on the desktop and simply remove the card. Then they sit at another desk, insert their card and the files and applications are open there for them.’

According to Ennis, many large call centres use this type of technology. However, he admits that getting companies with existing infrastructure to change overnight is not practical. ‘We are not advocating that companies throw out their existing infrastructure,’ he says. ‘But certainly, as infrastructure evolves, if they were to look towards a more centrally managed infrastructure it will lead to greater savings in the future.’

For those with a more traditional infrastructure, ie PCs running applications from their hard drives, there are a number of tools available for managing upgrades. Two of the key players in this market are Novell and Microsoft. Both of these companies use directories as the core technology in their upgrade management offerings.

‘In terms of what we have in play, we have a range of products and services,’ says Microsoft’s Largey. ‘From the services perspective the whole idea of software deployment is a complex job. Through our partners we provide off the shelf services such as architectural guidance and best practice to help organisations understand what they have taken on. The core technology we have in play contains tools within Active Directory that provides each user with their own profile. It is then possible to broadcast upgrades to defined profiles from a central console without the IT manager having to visit every desktop.’

Deployment

Ian Taylor, Microsoft Ireland’s Chief Technical Architect goes into more detail. ‘From a central console you can deploy to a pre-defined group of people. Then, the next time they log on the upgrade is downloaded to their hard disk. Windows 2000 has all of the Active Directory components. Windows 2000 Professional Desktop and Windows XP Professional has them built in as well.’

According to Taylor deploying into a LAN environment with large bandwidth is quite simple out of the box. However, for deploying into a WAN environment with restricted bandwidth other tools are available that integrate with the directory structure. ‘The main tool here is Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS). SMS allows us to package applications and distribute them around low bandwidth networks. It also manages the bandwidth so you can specify, for instance, that you only have 128kbit/s so you only want to distribute between 17:30 and midnight, or you only want it to use ten per cent of bandwidth during the day and 100 per cent at night.’

‘That’s key,’ says Largey. ‘With SMS in play, the upgrade does not have to interfere with running the business. It can happen as a background task or at night.’

‘A lot of work has been done around Trustworthy Computing and how we can distribute security patches to users’ says Taylor. ‘Microsoft’s software update service allows users at home on the Internet to go to the Microsoft site and download patches or to have the site pro-actively push out the patches. In an enterprise context, however, the company does not want individual users downloading patches without any controls. So an upgrade server sits inside the company firewall. The company then decides precisely what patches it wants to send out, how they are to be sent out and when they are to be sent out.’

Zero effort

Novell’s offer in this space is ZENworks. The ZEN stands for Zero Effort Networking. ‘ZENworks for Desktops has been around for about six years,’ says McAteer. ‘We currently have 37m seats deployed worldwide which probably puts us in the number one position in terms of usage. It is a completely cross platform product and will work in a Microsoft environment just as easily as a Netware one. So we are separating the desktop management solution from the platform you are going to run it on. We believe that the computing platform should be your choice. You may need NT for certain services so why shouldn’t your desktop management software sit on top of it. At present, ZENworks for Desktops will run on Netware, NT and Windows 2000. If someone is looking at Linux in a branch office, we can set up ZENworks at a head office and roll it out in the branch if necessary, but some core features cannot run under Linux.’

According to McAteer, ZENworks for Desktops is an application distribution, self healing applications that delivers applications based on who you are and not what PC you are sitting at. ‘Pushing down applications to a user is based on the fact that they may be a member of a particular group such as Finance or Marketing. We can do a ‘lights out’ update. Most PCs today have Wake on LAN technology, so we can wake it up and push the application down to it remotely.’

Laptops now account for 40 per cent of PCs sold to companies, so what happens if the user is on the road and can’t get back to the office. ‘We can have the user connect to the server over the Internet using a browser,’ says McAteer. ‘However, you have to have some sort of agent on the desktop. You can’t have a seamless update when the user is not directly on the network. For self healing, we look after disconnected users using a CD as it is not feasible to push a big application out across a WANlink.’ The self healing process is painless, explains McAteer. There is no installation icon and the self-healing occurs automatically and invisibly.

ZENWorks for Desktops is just one of a whole family of products. ‘We do the same type of distribution in ZEN for Servers if you want to manage servers,’ he says.

According to McAteer, not enough companies in the SME market are paying attention to desktop management. ‘It’s not just about file and printer servers,’ he says. ‘You need to lock down the desktop. You need to give the user the applications they need and remove everything else. I think that the likes of the Small Firms Association and the ISME need to look at this and focus on it.

Site Report:

Bord na Mona turns to Zen for enlightenment

With over 600 workstations scattered throughout 30 different locations around Ireland, managing software updates can be quite a headache for the MIS departments at Bord na Mona. ‘We have a mixture of leased lines and frame relay,’ explains Brinsley Sheridan, MIS Technical Manager. ‘The leased lines generally go to bog sites where there is no frame relay. Typical bandwidth for our network would be 64kbit/s while the backbone linking our headquarters sites would be 128kbit/s.’

Sheridan relies, therefore, on ZENworks 3.2 and e-Directory from Novell for managing upgrades. ‘We have been using ZENworks since it was version 1.0,’ he explains. ‘We used it initially for software distribution. With version 3.2, however, we can use it for other things like imaging workstations. In theory, every workstation has an identical copy of Windows 2000 installed. The base image is delivered via the ZENworks 3.2 imaging engine which is based on Linux.’

According to Sheridan, each machine on the Bord na Mona WAN has a pxe-enabled (protected extended environment) card. The first time a machine boots it does so from the network, it goes looking for the server. The ZENworks server responds and interrogates the machine as to its identity eg Fujitsu Siemens, HP etc. and delivers the appropriate Windows 2000 with the Novell client and all the latest service packs. ‘Everyone has the same setup,’ says Sheridan. ‘So there is no uncertainty if we decide to add a service pack. Everyone gets it at the same time.’

The situation, however, is complicated by the fact that for some locations, there is no economic justification for installing a ZEN server. For delivering software to those locations, Sheridan and his team use a third party adjunction to ZENworks called ZIM. This allows them to make a ZENworks image and put it on CD, which can be sent to the location in question. However, Sheridan expects to resolve this problem with the new version of ZENworks. ‘The key reason for us to upgrade is software updates over the Web. With Version 4.0 we will be able to use the Web browser to authenticate a user and deliver the software.’

An additional feature of ZENworks is that it allows hot-desking. ‘Say I am visiting the Cork office,’ says Sheridan. ‘I sit down at a machine in the finance department and I log in with my user ID and password. The Cork server knows what applications I am supposed to have and I see the icons for them. I then just double-click on the icons and the applications are downloaded. When I log out and the owner logs in again with their own ID and password, they do not see my stuff.’

ZENworks can also be used to manage access to resources such as printers. According to Sheridan, problems with printers account for a large number of calls to the help desk. By making sure that people only have access to the printer drivers and printers they actually need, ZENworks has the potential to cut down on the help desk calls considerably.

05/03/2003

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