2 page Case Study - Posted 11/11/2007

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DONG Energy

Energy Company Automates Operating System Deployment and Updates to 5,700 Computers

DONG Energy, Denmark’s largest energy company, needed a way quickly deploy a consistent technology infrastructure to 5,700 computers located across several countries. Its solution: Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007. DONG Energy has reduced the manual involvement in operating system deployment, automated the rollout of custom deployments, and gained a comprehensive overview of infrastructure status.

Business Needs

DONG Energy is the result of the 2006 merger among six major Danish energy-related companies. The company is engaged in virtually every aspect of the energy business, from oil and gas exploration through distribution, power generation and sales, energy trading, and even delivery of fiber to the home. DONG Energy maintains facilities in some 50 locations.

Merging six companies is the equivalent to building a company from scratch, at least when it comes to creating a single, coherent IT infrastructure. That was the task facing Chief Technology Officer Poul Westmose.

He faced the prospect of creating and rolling out a new Windows Server® 2003 Active Directory® structure for 5,000 users, equipping those users with new desktop and laptop computers—5,700 machines in all—and deploying not just the Windows Vista® operating system and 2007 Microsoft Office system software, but also the right combination of 750 applications that DONG Energy maintained for its users.

“Think of it as changing a tire at 130 miles per hour,” says Westmose.

DONG Energy’s predecessor companies had used a variety of software management tools to maintain their infrastructures, but those tools would no longer serve the combined organization. They wouldn’t scale to support the thousands of computers that DONG Energy needed to maintain. They wouldn’t support the deployment of Windows Vista.

The previous tools had required significant manual operation—and up to two hours per computer—to deploy operating system and application software. Even with ample bandwidth to many locations—DONG Energy, after all, is in the fiber business—remote management of 200 or more computers at a given site over wide-area network links was enough to degrade network performance.

And DONG Energy had no easy way of knowing whether software had been deployed successfully and which computers needed additional attention.

Solution

For DONG Energy, the solution to these concerns is Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007, the successor to Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. DONG Energy is deploying System Center Configuration Manager, with the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Globeteam, as its comprehensive software management solution throughout its enterprise for operating system deployment, software update management, and asset intelligence.

Deploying a new infrastructure and installing operating systems, applications, and drivers on thousands of computers across 50 locations and several countries, all within a year, is a massive task. We’re succeeding—and Configuration Manager is an essential part of our success. Poul Westmose Chief Technology Officer, DONG Energy

Users first identify their business units, which correspond to organizational units in Active Directory, and drive the choices available to them. They then choose the hardware and software options for their computers, including the operating system, language settings, and applications they want. When they receive their computers, they enter a four-digit code associated with their custom configuration.

Then, System Center Configuration Manager goes to work. The Task Sequencer capability in System Center Configuration Manager automatically manages the steps in each custom deployment process—deploying the user-specified operating system, drivers, and applications—which frees the user or IT personnel from manually activating each step. DONG Energy uses the Task Sequencer to automate the deployment of Windows Vista throughout the enterprise.

DONG Energy takes advantage of the Copy Package Wizard to automate package creation for application deployment. The application packages are then deployed using Branch Distribution Points, which minimize the amount of network bandwidth consumed by software distribution. Packages are pushed to an existing server computer in each facility, and then distributed as appropriate to computers in that facility.

Beyond software deployments and updates, DONG Energy uses the Asset Intelligence capability in System Center Configuration Manager to identify what software is running on its computers, in order to locate and remove unauthorized software as well as to ensure compliance for software licensing.

Benefits

“Deploying a new infrastructure and installing operating systems, applications, and drivers on thousands of computers across 50 locations and several countries, all within a year, is a massive task,” says Westmose. “We’re succeeding—and Configuration Manager is an essential part of our success.”

System Center Configuration Manager enables Westmose and his staff to make better use of their time. For example, the automation of update distribution and the ability to track and evaluate the success of those distributions reduces the amount of time that staff must spend managing the update process.

Part of the time-savings and added efficiency comes from the new System Center Configuration Manager Console. “The console gives us a simple overview of what’s happening in our environment,” says Westmose. “We see what’s deployed successfully, where the problems are and why. It’s definitely more user-friendly and saves our IT staff up to half an hour a day in time we would otherwise have to track down status information.”

Yet another benefit of System Center Configuration Manager is its comprehensiveness, which eliminates the need to learn, use, and maintain a range of software management tools. “With Configuration Manager, we get everything we need out of the box: operating system deployment, software update management, and asset intelligence,” says Westmose. “No other tool we have can do all of that.”