Opinions: Is SMS an option for this scenario?
From: SamP (samp_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 03/22/05
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Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 15:55:04 -0800
Hi there,
Forgive me if I chose the wrong group for this question. I am looking for
quick opinions as to whether SMS might be an option for my company's
particular scenario.
Background (as brief as possible):
We sell turnkey solutions where we control the software and hardware
environment for our customers. We have about 500 customer sites scattered
across North America at which we'd like to implement an automated deployment
and patch management solution. Each site has anywhere from 20 to 200 hundred
client machines, plus servers (so 30,000-50,000 nodes across the continent).
We want to be able to perform remote software deployment of MS patches, third
party applications/updates/patches, and our own software
installations/updates/patches.
Right now, we have 150 support staff who log in remotely to each customer
site through VPN, and then remotely deploy software manually at each client
machine.
We're just starting a preliminary evaluation of tools on the market. So far,
we have proceeded on the assumption that we're going to need to deploy a
client/server solution at each site in order to be able to manage each site
individually, perform upgrades of the deployment tool itself for each site
individually, etc.
This meant that we initially discarded any solution which required a fully
licensed version of SQL Server or Oracle for both cost and maintenance
reasons. The only player that came out of this evaluation is LANDesk, since
they support MSDE. Now we've discovered that LANDesk, for example, could
actually do all of this centrally without requiring a server config at each
site (or so many people are telling me), which eliminates the requirement
that a vendor support something like MSDE . We could have a series of servers
that we host, and control all of the sites individually, as well as control
updates to the LANDesk software for individual sites, etc. Just how that
works with updates, I don't really know. It sounds like have provisions for
fail-over, etc, which of course we be the types of concerns that immediately
come to my mind if your hosting such large numbers of client machines from a
series of centralized servers.
So my question is, without you knowing all of the details, could SMS
possibly be used in a similar way?
We will be doing a full evaluation, proof of concept, due diligence, and
possibly pulling in a consultant or two, but I just wanted to get some 30,000
foot opinions on how appropriate SMS might be in our situation.
Thanks
Sam
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