- What Is Internet Suspend/Resume (IS/R)?
- How IS/R Works
- IT Roll Back, Roll Out, and Roll On
- Master? Is That You?
- Tabula Rasa
IT Roll Back, Roll Out, and Roll On
While end users may dream of flipping down the keyboard on the back of the airline seat in front of them to resume their own computer screen, the first applications of IS/R are most likely to help IT do its job in-house, saving time and money for the enterprise. Consider some of the top IT benefits:
Great recovery from hardware failures. Traditionally, "if something broke, IT had to send someone, or the machine had to go out for repairs," says Kozuch. That could mean troubleshooting, or swapping out the machine and then re-customizing with software and dealing with lost data. With Internet Suspend/Resume, you can simply wheel in a new box, and the user is restored to almost what he had before the crash. Maybe he hadn't hit Suspend just before the zap, but how much less whining will you have to deal with when he gets that close to what he had, that fast?
Rollbacks without whiplash. Got Sasser? Made an upgrade booboo? Have no idea what Squirrelly User did to make the lights go out every time he opens a spreadsheet? Don't even play with Windows System Restore (especially if the user doesn't have Windows). Now who you gonna call?
Sweet build cycles. "When you join a (hypothetical) company, you get a laptop," says Kozuch. "The build process for a particular position involves specific applications, a home directory, personal settingsa potentially expensive process. Or, if the employee gets a home machine, you have to figure out whose it is, track it, make sure it gets to the right person, and do a periodic virus scan.... All of these operations are expensive," says Kozuch. Your IS/R server can store builds for every position.
Cool migration. Moving users from one machine to another, one operating system to another, or one software version to the next is no different from suspending and resuming, because the virtual machine state fools the software no matter where it is, or why. You can spend a night in the old "house," or grab a few last things if the new place isn't perfect yet. Just suspend the new environment and resume the old.