Hoteles Cercanos KatowiceHuntington Bancshares, Incorporated is a $29 billion regional bank holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Through its affiliated companies, Huntington has been serving the financial needs of its customers for more than 134 years. Huntington provides innovative products and services through more than 600 offices in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Challenges

Huntington is in the process of migrating over 2,000 workstations from OS/2 to Windows 2000 and deploying an additional 2,000 workstations with Windows 2000. As part of this migration, Huntington wanted to implement highly automated and efficient desktop management techniques and provide responsive service to their end users. This project would not only serve the migration purpose, but also provide for disaster recovery and business continuity.

Solution

From the start, Huntington wanted a centrally controlled, bulletproof process to roll out a new Windows 2000 platform along with new NT-based servers. They chose CMF over other products because of its ease of use, superior operational efficiencies, disaster recovery, and automation capabilities.

Huntington needed to create an unattended and automated process that would serve a dual purpose: first, it would be used for the pristine install of new Windows 2000 workstations, and second, it would be used to recover the workstation in case of any disaster. Rather than a one-time image build, LSVi assisted Huntington in creating a resilient ongoing process, whereby new Windows 2000 workstations could be installed, or existing workstations could be recovered or rebuilt, based upon the most current standard workstation image. To accomplish this task, LSVi engineered a seeding process that would bootstrap the operating system installation from a network code server, and then invoke CMF to install the most recent business functional software profile.

The "seeding" process was created so that a complete image build could be started with a DOS bootable diskette containing enough software to connect to a network code server, to load the CMF node installation software, and to run the configuration-build process. The configuration build process provides unique configuration values, like network addresses, which supply a workstation with its particular identity. The seeding process reformats the hard drive, and then starts the unattended install of the Windows 2000 operating system from a networked CMF code server. The CMF code server contains the Windows 2000 operating system image and the CMF Intermediate Server Agent. The CMF Intermediate Server Agent automatically collects software from the CMF Central Server Corporate Software Repository, so that the latest version of the business functional profile is available to the workstation, whether it is for a first time pristine install, or recovery-driven rebuild of the workstation. In this way, the most current version of software and unique configuration values are always available for the workstation first time install or the recovery install process.

Huntington also needed to reduce the time and complexity in building new NT servers. The manual process to build an NT server was error prone and took eight hours to complete. Minimizing manual tasks required from third-party vendors would be the key to reliability and cost control in rolling out Windows 2000. Huntington determined that servers and workstations needed to be pre-configured in a "factory" warehouse and then shipped to a remote branch location. On site, the new foolproof seeding procedure would be executed to quickly install the new "ready to go" hardware. The CMF software management system would then automatically update the machines during an extended rollout period with any configuration or software changes developed after the initial factory cloning process.

By utilizing CMF's software profiling features, NT servers and Windows 2000 workstations are now built from scratch in a vendor's "factory" in about an hour, and require only ten minutes of initial staff attention to specify four unique variables per machine. Once these pre-configured machines are installed in a branch office of the bank, CMF updates the software packages and configuration of these machines with any last minute changes specified from the CMF central distribution facility, all without any manual local intervention.

Benefits

• cheap hotels in Valkenburg Huntington has achieved a high degree of automation with CMF, allowing them to support and migrate thousands of desktops with a very small staff and a lower total cost of ownership
  
  
• With CMF, Huntington has ensured high availability for the bank's employees, with a successful software installation rate of over 99 percent.
  
  
• Huntington gained the responsiveness necessary to rapidly respond to changing business needs and technology.