Ardence - Comparison to Traditional Client Management Systems

Client Management solutions were created to address the problematic areas of running a desktop computing environment: deployment, security/stability, management and upkeep. Here is a list of some of the leading products in these areas. Click on the links to learn more about these products and to find out why Ardence is better.

Norton Ghost

The technology of ghosting was a boon to all IT staff when it first appeared. The key benefit was that it greatly reduced the time it took to deploy a desktop image to multiple machines. It also reduced the likelihood of configuration errors by removing the need for a user to replicate the same actions on multiple machines. While the "ghosting" process has become the standard for all multiple machine deployments it is not without its downsides.

"Ghosting," while faster than manual workstation setup, is still a time consuming process. Disk-to-disk operations are fast but only allow for cloning one machine at a time. Network "ghosting" allows for multiple machines to be imaged at once but it is a bandwidth hog. Technicians usually have to perform these actions during off-hours or holidays so that the entire network isn't brought down by a ghost session.

Using Ardence to setup workstations is much faster than Ghost because the image is not copied to the hard drives of each machine. The workstations stream the image, live, from a server when they are booted. Unlike Ghost, using Ardence will not cripple the network as only portions of the overall image are delivered to the workstation as needed. There is no waiting for hours for a large image to be duplicated to each machine. The turn around time from image creation to workstation usability is a matter of minutes.

While ghosting is used primarily for deployment situations, technicians also use it to manage the upkeep of machines by updating the "master image" with a patch and then reimaging all the machines. This is somewhat of a brute force methodology to applying patches; the proverbial "drinking water from a firehouse" analogy. Oftentimes, a patch is relatively small and it may be faster to install the patch at each workstation manually. With the number of Windows Updates and security patches coming from Microsoft almost everyday, the process of "ghosting" each series of updates becomes impractical. Technicians often wait long periods of time in order to install a large amount of updates at one sitting in order to make "ghosting" worthwhile but the security of the machine is in jeopardy during this period.

Ardence makes the chore of maintaining images with patches and updates a breeze. Updating an entire lab only requires updating the image on one of the machines in private mode (write-capable). Once the patch has been applied, the image is set back into shared mode (read-only) and the clients are rebooted, the entire lab will have that patch, guaranteed. There is no time wasted in creating a new image and deploying it to each workstation after the patch has been installed.

With Ghost, if you create your master image and realize that you forgot to make a change or install a particular application, you would either have to go back and recreate the image and wait for it to deploy again or you would have to make the change or install the application to each workstation manually.

Terminal Services

Terminal services technology has been around for a long time. One of the chief benefits of terminal services is that the desktop environment is centrally managed. Applications and updates only have to be installed at one location, the terminal server. The problem is that this is much easier said than done. Applications often have to be installed with special configuration or transformations in order to get them to work in a terminal services environment. For example, Microsoft Office has to be "transformed" before it will operate in terminal services. While Microsoft provides the means to make Microsoft Office compatible for terminal services use, the whole installation process is somewhat complicated. In addition to the added complexity of installation, many software packages are just not compatible with terminal services.

Ardence, on the other hand, delivers the benefit of being able to manage the desktop environment through a single instance without any of the drawbacks of terminal services. This is because application installation and execution occurs in the regular desktop environment. As far as the operating system is concerned, it thinks it is installed on a normal workstation with a hard drive. This means that applications that you could normally install at a workstation with a hard drive will be compatible with a workstation running Ardence. There is no need for the complexities of transformation files or special configurations.

Terminal services was created in an environment where having powerful workstations was cost prohibitive. All the processing in the user environment on terminal services is handled at the server. This meant that the server had to be very powerful in order to handle the demands of multiple users sessions. Modern workstations, however, are quite powerful yet very affordable. There is undoubtedly a significant price premium in having a terminal server with the same processing power as multiple workstations' processing power it tries to replace.

Ardence takes advantage of this fact by not relying on the processing power of the server to do the work for the workstations. The processing occurs at the workstation and does not require a powerful or expensive server to support the software. This makes Ardence a much more cost effective solution that can be implemented at locations with a modest computing infrastructure.

Fortres Clean Slate

Fortres Clean Slate is an application that operates similar to Ardence in that it provides non-restrictive desktop security. It does this by taking all file activity and writing changes to a cache instead of directly to the original files. When the system is logged off or rebooted the cache is purged. While this is a significant improvement over security software that is restrictive to the point where the workstations are barely useable, the scope of this software solution is not complete.

With Fortres Clean Slate, the management of each workstation still needs to occur at each workstation. Changes need to be approved at each workstation before they are committed. This adds more time and additional complexity to workstation upkeep. If one were to make a mistake and authorize a change on one workstation but not another, the operating environment between the two would start to differ. Over time the number of difference could increase making managing the machines even more difficult. Because Ardence has the workstations operating from a shared image, the workstations cannot develop the differences in the operating configuration that complicate the management of the machines.

With Clean Slate, workstations are still susceptible to image corruption due to hard disk failure. The only option for technicians in these cases is to replace the hard drive and "ghost" or rebuild the workstation image manually. This of course can be a time consuming process and it requires other software to handle the "ghosting" operation.

With Ardence, workstation replacement due to hardware failure (excluding the hard drive since there is none) is simply a matter of swapping out the workstation with another with the same hardware and booting it to the network and selecting the virtual disk image used by the previous workstation. It makes a workstation operate as an appliance that can be easily replaced.

Altiris Client Management Suite

The Altiris Client Management Suite is a powerful set of applications used to manage the complete lifecycle of a workstation. It handles image deployment, application deployment and patch management. Image deployment operates along the lines of Ghost and is subject to the same shortcomings that Ghost has (i.e., deployment times and network congestion). Application deployment and patch management are handled as schedulable tasks at a centralized management console. While this makes it significantly easier than having to go to each workstation to deploy the applications or the updates, creating the scripts and configuring the applications to deploy over the network is an exceedingly complicated affair. Altiris requires the advanced knowledge of scripting and a detailed understanding of the operating system to successfully run these types of tasks.

As mentioned previously, Ardence makes patch management and application install as simple as installing it at a regular workstation that does not have Ardence. The only difference is that once it is installed at the workstation running Ardence, it instantly becomes available to all the workstations using that image.

With Altiris, because each machine is still a separate entity with its own image, there is a likelihood that some patches or applications will not deploy properly to a machine and deploy properly to others. This is because as users utilize these workstations, changes will be made that may affect operating system settings and the desktop environment. This is especially common now that spyware is so prevalent. In short, Altiris has no means to address the security of the desktop environment outside of patch management or image redeployment.

With Ardence, images cannot be corrupted by the user. System changes, even those due to spyware or viruses can be "fixed" by a simple reboot of the workstation. As far as the reliability of patch or application deployment goes, if it can be added to the image, it is guaranteed to be on every workstation using that image.