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Acronis provides easy-to-use disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration and other storage management products for enterprises, corporations and individual consumers.

Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0

Complete system deployment solution using disk imaging technology

Businesses today face increasing challenges when it comes to configuring and deploying new machines in a distributed, corporate environment. Having a deployment solution in place that enables businesses to use a standard configuration for a new PC or server can decrease support expenses significantly.

Acronis has a solution to address this need. Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0 is a comprehensive deployment solution that enables organizations to deploy new machines quickly and easily.

Using Acronis' own award-winning disk imaging technology, the product creates an exact disk image of the standard configuration, including the operating system and all applications. It then deploys that image to multiple systems simultaneously, making it ideal for rapid bare-metal installations of PCs and servers. Businesses have the option to deploy new machines using both the multicast and unicast protocols, providing maximum flexibility.

Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0 also provides configuration management tools to configure system settings, manage files, and execute applications on systems throughout the network.

New Features introduced in 2.0:

Deploy to different hardware with Acronis Universal Deploy*— Ensure that your new systems will boot by allowing you to add drivers and create templates for specific hardware

New media builder — Facilitate deployment by providing more options for creating bootable media. Create ISOs, Microsoft Remote Installation Service (RIS) packages, and place multiple configurations on one CD

64-bit Windows support — Deploy both new and older systems using one solution

Customisable deployment options — Maximize the performance of new machines by allowing partitions to be resized. Ensure that machines are properly deployed by providing options to reboot or shutdown after the master image is applied

Enhanced PXE server — More easily create a PXE by specifying default configurations and timeout parameters for reboot

Management Console

The Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0 Management Console provides centralized management of deployments across the network. From the management console you can:

Deploy images to multiple PCs simultaneously — select systems on the network to deploy the image

Configuration management — create, edit, and delete software configurations

Create standard images — clone existing systems and save the images

Check images — ensure image integrity before using for deployment

Create bootable media — boot a bare system locally

Configure Acronis PXE server — boot a bare system from the network without bootable media

Manage files on remote systems — create and edit files/ folders on a deployed system

Execute applications on remote PCs — create scheduled tasks to run applications on a deployed system

View results of deployment operations — open deployment logs

Configuration Management

Acronis Snap Deploy 2.0 provides configuration management to perform pre- and post-deployment tasks that simplify deployment and ongoing maintenance of systems:

Pre-deployment tools

Create a standard PC image of an entire existing hard disk drive or selected partitions

Save the image to almost any device such as:

• a hard disk drive
• a network drive
• a removable storage device

Compress the image by selecting from one of four compression levels

Add user account information by entering username and password for target systems

Assign names to PCs using wild cards to generate unique names

Assign domain/workgroup membership of PCs

Set Internet protocol (IP) settings automatically or manually

Assign DNS server properties automatically or manually

Change the Security identifier (SID)

Edit and delete PC configurations

Post-deployment tools

Manage files on remote systems by creating and editing files/folders

Execute applications on remote PCs by scheduling tasks

Universal Deploy

Universal Deploy provides a simple way for you to deploy new systems with different hardware. A standard configuration image can easily be deployed to identical hardware. However, while this method works for systems with the same hardware, it can fail with machines running different hardware. Systems in such cases may fail to boot because the critical Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and mass storage device drivers are missing. While Microsoft SysPrep technology allows you to import plug-and-play drivers, such as sound, video, and network drivers, it does not allow you to import the drivers required to boot the machine.

Universal Deploy provides an efficient solution for hardware-independent system deployment by allowing you to install the crucial HAL and mass-storage device drivers in an image. With this feature you can automatically or manually select the HAL and mass-storage device drivers to fit the target hardware, ensuring that newly deployed systems with different hardware are deployed properly.