Education Success Story: Saint Paul's School Imaging

Saint Paul's School, a long-term Netcare monitored customer of Big Sur Technologies, has over 200 physical client machines in a cross platform environment of both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X. As part of an IT Infrastructure Assessment that was performed by Big Sur, one of the key areas for improvement was identified as reducing the "go live" time of resource and machine deployment. Managing these redeployments of resources and core operating system reinstalls/reformats by hand was deemed extremely time intensive, requiring at times 3+ hours per machine. Saint Paul's school has devoted a massive amount of resources into 3 separate top of the line gigabit speed lab's. These labs consist of Apple iMacs, which run both Microsoft Windows XP and Apple OS X. Faculty and staff use both environments during their instruction to show cross platform compatibility, giving them the tools they need to instruct the students in the most efficient way possible. In addition, there are several student laptop carts available for students to use during classes and for homework, as well as each faculty and staff member having a laptop. The faculty laptops have a host of applications which include the ability to roam which requires us to enable the availability of offline caching and online synchronization.

Big Sur created specific images for specific needs: faculty laptops with full productivity suites ranging from Novell Groupwise, Microsoft MAC Office 2004 and Apple iWorks '08. The student laptops were configured with locked-down permissions, secure file areas and other tools that enhance their learning experience. By hosting the workstation images on a central server and setting up network imaging, Big Sur reduced the amount of time needed to completely restore and redeploy a machine to under half an hour - a savings of over 2 hours, in addition to being almost completely hands off. Instead of installing an OS by hand, applying patches, installing software, and binding to a domain, the process is reduced to one keystroke at boot.

By implementing an imaging solution at Saint Paul's school we are able to give the end users an efficient way to reimage and restore machines to a perfectly clean install. Saint Paul's redeployment process for client machines is now manageable, efficient and easy.