University College London & the UIUUniversity College London undergoes IT education with Universal Imaging Utility University College, London (UCL) is one of the top five universities in the UK. The university is made up of 72 academic departments, within eight faculties, based over multiple sites scattered throughout central London and beyond. The Information Systems department provides IT facilities for both staff and students throughout the university. With such a large and dispersed operation, managing the university's IT needs from its Bloomsbury location is very challenging. Information Systems supports over 3,000 PCs under its ‘managed PCs' service and is required to maintain workstations that hold identical software and numerous types of drivers. This needs to be done in a cost-effective and scalable manner. The management of enterprise applications requires substantial effort within many large educational institutions. Software updates, patches, new versions and industry-specific solutions all have to be installed and set up to meet varied desktop, laptop, storage-drive and controller requirements. When device drivers are brought into the equation, it becomes even more complicated. Simple Cloning was not the Answer Software-based cloning was already in place at UCL. The cloning package UCL uses to update its computers is a proprietary program, developed by the technical team and based on PXE/Linux and NTFSclone. Even with that, UCL still had to create and maintain 15-20 master Images to support the various brands of desktops at multiple sites within the organization. The technology limitations restricted the Information Systems team to using an increasingly limited range of hardware suppliers, as every hardware change could inherently require a new Image to be created and/or deployed. Maria Darmon, Assistant Director at Information Systems, UCL, said: "Maintaining all of those separate Images was a complex and time consuming task. We needed a solution that was simple yet thorough, which allowed us to create a single Image that could be deployed across the university in a short space of time. We also needed to be much more accommodating in our ability to support these Images across a range of different hardware from contracted suppliers." She continued: "Another area for concern was where we had an urgent need to deploy updates to our systems. Multiple Images had to be updated in order for us to target critical client systems on a frequent basis." The Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) was UCL's solution. Hardware-Independent Images Binary Resource UK originally introduced the Universal Imaging Utility to UCL in August 2005 when the university purchased a 3,000 seat license to run the product across its IT network. A relatively new product, UIU enables Users to prepare a single, hardware-independent master Image file, thus greatly reducing the time and expense associated with Image creation and maintenance. Using UIU, UCL is now able to maintain just a few master Images throughout its environment of disparate Desktops. The license was subsequently renewed by UCL in September 2006. "Running UIU on the ideal machine prior to an Image being captured by any of the industry-standard cloning packages means any error messages and ‘blue screen' failures on the destination or cloned machines are virtually eliminated," explains Geoff McIntosh, Managing Director, Binary Resource UK. "Rolling-out software updates and setting up new desktops and laptops can be managed within a matter of minutes and a previously complex and time-consuming operation can be transformed into a simple, straightforward, fully-automated task," he continued. "This enables IT departments to drastically reduce the time and money spent on Image creation, maintenance and deployment by streamlining the cloning process. UIU works with virtually all brands and models of Windows-based laptops and desktops. This ensures that IT resources may be focused on more business-critical tasks." UIU Eases Purchasing Restrictions and Extends IT Budget Simon Walsh, IT Purchasing Officer at Information Systems, UCL, said: "Before we started using UIU, our purchasing options for PCs were very limited. Maintaining core components over a protracted period of time was very difficult and not very cost effective. We discovered that we were unable to take full advantage of advancing technology trends and advantageous price breaks. He continued: "We often found ourselves locked into purchasing a particular model for a longer period of time than we would have hoped for, in order to avoid having to create and maintain yet another Image." Maria Darmon concluded: "Following the introduction of UIU, we can now maintain a small number of images for an increasingly large range of hardware from different contracted suppliers." "Images are now faster and easier to maintain and allow us to make much better use of our staff resources."
About the Universal Imaging Utility The UIU is developed by Big Bang LLC, a Milwaukee, WI-based software training, consulting and development company and pioneer of hardware-independent imaging. Big Bang has partnered with Binary Research International, Inc., of Glendale, WI and its English subsidiary - Binary Resource (UK) Ltd. Binary, a developer and provider of IT Training and a Distributor of software, is best known as being part of the company that developed Ghost, the world's first software cloning utility. Learn more about Big Bang on the web at www.UIUforYou.com.
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