Carnival Cruise Lines is to deploy a system to manage
and provision 4,000 PCs remotely, including 1,200 installed on the
company's 19 ships - eliminating the need to fly technicians to
various ports of call to handle critical upgrades or
fixes.
Doug Eney, vice president for information systems engineering at
Carnival Cruise Lines, a division of Carnival in Miami, said the
remote PC management system from On Technology will save him from
"flying people around the globe" to perform upgrades to shipboard
computers.
Eney said he chose On Technology's iCommand software over
competing products such as Microsoft's Systems Management Server
because it met the demands of Carnival's unique client/server
architecture.
Although Microsoft's product could handle remote management of
PCs connected to a high-speed Lan, it could not do the same for
remote clients connected over slower links, such as the satellite
system Carnival uses with its shipboard PCs.
The satellite system provides Carnival with 1Mbit/sec. total
bandwidth, but that bandwidth is shared among all the ships. That
drops the effective data rate to and from each vessel to
128Kbit/sec.
Carnival has just completed a pilot of iCommand with 200
shore-based computers and will start to deploy the software
throughout its network over the next year.
Eney said the remote management software will provide Carnival
with a good return on investment and a "quick payback" but declined
to provide specific financial details.
Valerie O'Connell, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, said that for
companies with 20 or more PCs, automating updates to both operating
systems and applications makes sense because of the time needed to
do such tasks manually.
Eney said automated patch management would definitely help in a
world where "instead of taking a vitamin once a day, you get
once-a-day Microsoft patches".
'Connell said that when it comes to patch management, "anybody
who tries to save a couple of pennies by not automating patch
management does not understand what they are dealing with."
The iCommand software will also help Carnival save time and
money in constant migrations from one Microsoft operating system to
another, and it will help when updating numerous applications used
ashore and afloat to handle everything from passenger credit card
purchases to ship parts, food and beverage inventories, as well as
passenger and crew e-mail systems.
Phil Neray, vice president for marketing at On Technology, said
the iCommand system includes a software console installed at
Carnival which contains a database of all of the company's PCs,
their operating systems and the applications running on each of
them. When Carnival needs to do an upgrade or install a patch, all
an operator needs to do is drag and drop an icon of the software
onto the icon of a PC on the screen.
That action in turn sends the software package or patch to an
"agent" on the remote device, which then installs it. Neray said
the PC does not even have to be turned on to perform the upgrade -
the agent includes a "wake-up" function, which automatically turns
it on when a patch is sent.
Eney said his pilot project showed that rolling out iCommand in
a heterogeneous computing environment is a challenge. Even though
Carnival standardised on PCs from Dell and Hewlett-Packard, neither
the hardware nor key software components such as drivers are
identical. That has complicated the use of the "wake-up" software
at times.
In such a complex environment, Eney said there was "no such
thing as instant gratification"." He recommended that any company
seeking to use iCommand set up a good pilot and test plan before
widespread deployment is attempted.
Bob Brewin writes for Computerworld