IBM CSD IMAGEULTRA CASE STUDY, July 3 version, page 1 of 3
Hong Kong Correctional Services Department streamlines multi-site PC deployment with ImageUltra
With more than 2,500 PCs installed at its headquarters and 34 remote locations around Hong Kong, the SAR Government's Correctional Services Department (CSD) spends considerable time and effort maintaining multiple software images to support its diverse environment. By using IBM's ImageUltra service to streamline new PC configuration, CSD has achieved significant saving in deployment costs along with the prospect of simplifying its long-term PC system maintenance.
With an establishment of nearly 7,000 staff, the CSD is responsible for the administration of 24 correctional institutions that now accommodate about 11,000 inmates. These include prisons, juvenile detention centres, custodial wards at public hospitals, half-way houses, centres for drug addiction and psychiatric treatment and a training school.
"Our operations are diverse with sites right across the territory including some of the outlying islands," said Wilfred Ma, the Superintendent of Information Technology Services Unit of CSD. "While we have a strong IT team there's only a handful of PC support staff but, with an infrastructure based on IBM Director, we are able to do remote PC management and troubleshooting.
"However, we also purchase hundreds of new PCs every year and how they're configured – with what software and settings – varies from site to site which means there's a lot of overhead involved in preparing software images for deployment and subsequently maintaining them."
The "software image" on every PC consists of five elements: operating system, hardware system specifics, language, network-specific drivers, and applications. For organisations like the CSD, which maintain thousands of PCs, combinations of these five elements can create a large number of different software images.
Like many other medium-to-large companies and organisation, CSD's practice has been to install and configure the operating system plus all the required applications manually to create a master image for a subset of its PCs, and then clone the image and deploy it to new machines. The process has to be repeated for every PC subset and, in addition, all the master software images must be kept up-to-date with new software releases, OS patches and drivers.
CSD currently supports three generations of PC operating system – Windows XP, 2000 and 98, with both English and Traditional Chinese variants – on a range of PC hardware platforms. In addition each PC runs about 20 different applications that make up the elements of the Government Office Automation (GOA) system including IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office. According to Ma a typical PC goes through some kind of software upgrade every six to nine months.
"When we heard about ImageUltra in the middle of 2002, we'd been looking for a way to streamline image management for some time," said Ma.
ImageUltra is a set of services using patented IBM technologies. It simplifies the software image management by creating custom images from a single "super-image" that combines multiple hardware platforms, operating systems, and languages with workgroup-specific applications. ImageUltra gets around the problem of hardware, network and languages differences – and eases updates to the OS and application set – by compartmentalising these elements so they can be uncoupled and dealt with separately prior to their harmonious reintegration on each PC.
A team from IBM's PC Division worked with CSD technical staff in August 2002 to study the feasibility of using ImageUltra in the new PC rollout. Using IBM's Universal Manageability Calculator they were able to analyse the cost of manual configuration and compare it to the cost of ImageUltra deployment. The result was an impressive 38 per cent saving, just on one deployment exercise and not including the further savings to be had from simplified image management in the long term.
On this basis CSD gave the go-ahead, at which point IBM's technicians went to work building the super-image, simulating the manual installation process at IBM's Yamato Lab in Japan and undertaking thorough testing to ensure the lab-created image was exactly what CSD required.
"IBM staff were very professional in both the planning and implementation stages. Communication between local office and the lab in Japan was very smooth and efficient, ensuring our tight schedule was met," said Ma.
In October hundreds of new IBM NetVista M42 systems were shipped and loaded with the super-image with the site-by-site rollout completed in January 2003. Once each PC was in place, a fully customised operating system, driver and application software installation was triggered from the super-image using a user profile script.
"It has been a very successful exercise and ImageUltra proved its value by greatly reducing the amount of time and effort required to build images for our diverse PC installations within a complex IT environment. That's something our PC support staff are very happy,” said Ma.