Disk Imaging Software for SMBs

One of my first IT jobs was working on a 2000-seat desktop migration to Windows 2000. Our team faced a daunting set of challenges: preserving locally stored data, managing the array of drivers required to keep a diverse installed base humming, efficiently deploying managed desktops across a campus. We dubbed our eventual solution "the octopus cart." It was a four-wheeled cart with a server running Symantec Ghost, a switch, and a bag of patch cords. We rolled our cart into an office and idled a dozen workers for two to three hours while we ran a custom backup script, deployed the new OS, restored data, and then dealt with BIOS and driver issues.

With more robust networks and more cooperative hardware and OSs, organizations today prefer desktop deployment over the network to the in-person utility-cart method. Imaging software is at the core of these strategies. I tested three popular tools to find viable imaging solutions for desktop deployment and backup for a small or midsized business (SMB). Symantec Ghost Solution Suite offers systems management features in addition to imaging. The other two products I reviewed—Acronis True Image Workstation and Paragon Software's Paragon Drive Backup Professional focus more narrowly on imaging for backup and deployment.

Key Features
Imaging at its most basic is bundling an entire drive or partition as a file and then restoring it to another partition or drive. Imaging products can serve a business of any size as a long-term investment. Distributed organizations can benefit from centrally controlled imaging that a system administrator can deliver and track from one location.

I used three criteria to evaluate Symantec Ghost Solution Suite, Acronis True Image Workstation, and Paragon Drive Backup Professional. First, I looked at how well each application backs up and recovers individual files or complete disks. Second, I tested how the product performs desktop deployment. You can use any desktop imaging tool to make an exact copy of a hard drive and restore it on other identical machines, but more sophisticated tools can also automate the Microsoft Sysprep utility and driver injection to deploy and manage an OS on varying hardware platforms. Third, I examined the performance of the three imaging products. I used each application to do an identical imaging and restoration job across a network to compare the applications' speed.

Ghost Solution Suite has an elegant backup and recovery feature. Differential backups can be regularly scheduled and triggered remotely for managed computers, including groups of computers. Each backup or recovery requires the client computer to boot to the Ghost environment, idling anyone who might have been trying to use the computer at the time. The other two imaging products in this review cleverly utilize Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create the image without interfering with current operations.

Although Ghost Solution Suite is capable of creating images of Linux machines, it's clearly geared toward Windows, with many Windows- and Active Directory (AD)-specific integration points. For instance, Ghost can migrate a Windows user's data and state. Ghost Solution Suite retains the features that made Ghost the gold standard for imaging, all controlled via a central console. For example, tasks such as deployments can be scheduled.

One particularly useful tool for deployment is Ghost's multicast feature. When you initiate a larger scale image deployment, multiple clients can download a single image transmitted from the console, significantly cutting down on the bandwidth required for remote deployment. Midsized and large companies can benefit from multicasting to reduce the impact of deployment on the network. In addition, Ghost can limit throughput so that a deployment won't saturate the network.

Creating a 4GB image over a network connection took 30 minutes. Restoring the same image to the same workstation took 20 minutes.

A new feature in Ghost Solution Suite is the ability to edit existing images as files. Thus you can make configuration changes or add upgraded applications to an image without creating an entirely new base image.

For midsized and large companies, Symantec offers a panoply of features at an inviting price. These include the ability to inventory the enterprise's software and hardware and deploy software. Considering the array of features, the interface (which Figure 1 shows) is quite clean. However, I'd prefer to see more wizards and fewer tabbed dialog boxes. Ghost Solution Suite has a more gentle learning curve than that of the desktop management powerhouse Microsoft SMS and is significantly easier to set up. However, Ghost does require some significant energy from the IT team to realize the product's benefits. It's my selection for Editor's Choice, although it has more features than what a small business would typically want or need.

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