November 2004 - Posts
Both version of the BDD where released today. Enterprise and Standard can both be downloaded as well go to the Technet site that talks about it specifically. When you download the solution you get a series of documentation as well as templates that will allow you to make the decision on what version you want to use or not. BDD is a great solution accelerator in many ways depending how you want to leverage it. If you have a mid-sized company of say 500 people and you had to deploy amd implement a build process for desktops in your environement.
If you were to add multiple locations as well as different types of installs it becomes even more complicated. Standard allows you to do some touch installations for customers and the Enterprise version will allow you to do what they call Zero Touch on the desktops as well as servers. One of the main differences between the 2 versions is the number of desktops that can be handled.
Features with BDD
End-to-End Guidance for Efficient Planning, Building, and Deployment of Windows XP Professional and Office Professional Edition 2003 Real world experience and industry best practices Zero Touch Scenario A managed desktop environment Virtual PC 2004, allowing users to simultaneously run multiple operating systems The Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit Technical Guides Great tool to take a look at.
Many things can come from BDD
- Reduce operational costs and complexity by Automating the installation and change management for new users, new services, and new applications. Reduction in support call as well as provide a framework to migrate seemlessly.
- Improve customer satisfaction in a few ways. Decreasing time-to-customer-request completion as well as becoming able to meet the SLA that has been established for the customer.
- Increase repeatability by Reducing time to build new servers and workstations as well as deploy service packs. This will lower engineering costs as well you to leverage Web Services and cut back on engineering costs. Leverage the .Net Framework
Microsoft a while back decided that MOM and SMS would become a single product and call it System Center. Now it has now become part of the DSI or Dynamic Systems Initiative since many of the items rom MOM and SMS can be leveraged better together than apart.You can leverage the event information that you will be using with MOM 2005 and as well any and all change management and inventory that SMS 2003 can use.
What System Center will include:
- Systems Management Server 2003
- Operating System Deployment Feature Pack
- Device Management Feature Pack
- Administration Feature Pack
- Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
- System Center Reporting Server
The white paper can be Downloaded here
Data Protection Server is an interesting new server product that Microsoft has released and it should provide benefit to just about anyone. With the cost of hard disks going down daily it is easy for you to replace your tape backup system. You don’t have to get rid of tapes completely; they can be used for offsite storage if you want. According to recently compiled market data, tape unreliability prevented 42 percent of tape customers from restoring their data from tape during the past year.
With a wide assortment of partners taking a look at Data Protection server and getting on the band wagon it looks like the first version of this product maybe in order. Microsoft has a open evaluation here. It maybe something to check out and evaluate for your business.
Reasons that I think this is a good move by Microsoft is because of the stats that say data is going to be a problem in the future. How do we store all of this information? Here is an interesting piece of research.
- Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.
- The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
- Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.
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