New Bay Media and Rutherford & Chekene Opts for Symantec Ghost

Symantec Corp. announced New Bay Media and Rutherford and Chekene (R&C) are using Symantec technologies to streamline the process of upgrading to the Windows 7 operating system. These companies rely on Symantec and their solution providers to help them manage and automate the migration process to take advantage of the faster performance, improved search and better diagnostics features Windows 7 offers over previous versions.

New Bay Media
New Bay Media produces more than 40 publications, 50 websites and 30 electronic newsletters for video and audio professionals, musicians and educators such as Guitar Player, Tech & Learning, DV Magazine and Radio World. The majority of the company’s 200 employees use Windows-based desktops and laptops, and the company participated in the Windows 7 early adopters program as it prepared to upgrade from Windows XP. New Bay Media has used Symantec Ghost Solution Suite and Symantec Enterprise Vault for years, and turned to both solutions to help streamline migration.

New Bay used Ghost Solution Suite to create the necessary standardized images for the migration process, cloning standardized images to new machines. Multiple machines needed to be prepared at the same time, and the multicasting capability of Ghost helped minimize network traffic. Ghost enabled the IT team to send a five gigabyte image over the network to hundreds or thousands of machines with a single click, and only five gigabytes total travels over the network. The image deploys simultaneously on all machines.

Symantec Enterprise Vault helped New Bay sort and identify older files through its file system archiving feature. Close to a terabyte of data was moved to the Enterprise Vault archive, reopening valuable storage and cutting down migration time. Enterprise Vault archived, indexed, deduplicated, and compressed those files, making them easier to search and retrieve.

Rutherford and Chekene
Rutherford and Chekene (R&C), an 85-person San Francisco-based engineering firm, realized it needed faster workstations to help employees keep up with the firm’s changing business requirements. R&C had 90 custom-built workstations, but each was limited by Windows XP to maximum of three gigabytes of RAM. Design documents are now in 3D, and models of complex, high tech buildings have expanded exponentially. Some 3D files can be as large as 250 megabytes, and employees on Windows XP desktops found themselves waiting for their machines to respond with every mouse click.

Working with its solution provider Irvine Consulting Services (ICS), R&C adopted the 64-bit Windows 7 operating system, which has enabled an upgrade to 12 gigabytes of RAM. R&C also took the opportunity to standardize disk images and motherboards across its custom-built systems. Like New Bay Media, Irvine Consulting leveraged Symantec Ghost Solution Suite to migrate R&C’s systems to Windows 7 via Ghost’s single management console.

"Using Ghost to deploy these images was simple and it worked. I’ve used it for 10 years because it exponentially reduces the time deployments take. If there are multiple matchings that need to be prepared at the same time, we can multicast the image to them," said Greg M. Topf, director of Information Technology, New Bay Media.

“We surveyed Rutherford and Chekene employees and came up with a standard set of applications for every engineering workstation. We are using Symantec Ghost Solution Suite to ensure those applications are placed on all workstations, and that will save us a projected 20 percent in deployment and administration time," said David Irvine, president, Irvine Consulting Services.