Carnival Cruise Lines to manage its 4,000 PCs remotely

Computerworld - Carnival Cruise Lines plans to deploy a system to remotely manage and provision 4,000 PCs, including 1,200 installed on the company's 19 ships -- eliminating the need to fly technicians to various ports of call to handle critical upgrades or fixes.
Doug Eney, vice president for information systems engineering at Carnival Cruise Lines, a division of Carnival Corp. in Miami, said the remote PC management system from On Technology Corp. in Waltham, Mass., will literally save him from "flying people around the globe" to perform upgrades to shipboard computers.
Eney said he chose On Technology's iCommand software over competing products such as Microsoft Corp.'s Systems Management Server because it met the demands of Carnival's unique client/server architecture. Although Microsoft's product could handle remote management of PCs connected to a high-speed LAN, it can't do the same for remote clients connected over slower links such as the C-band satellite system Carnival uses with its shipboard PCs, Eney said.
The satellite system provides Carnival with 1Mbit/sec. total bandwidth, but that bandwidth is shared among all the ships. That drops the effective data rate to and from each vessel to 128Kbit/sec.
Eney said Carnival has just completed a pilot of iCommand with 200 shore-based computers and will start to deploy the software throughout its network over the next year. Eney said the remote management software will provide Carnival with a good return on investment and a "quick payback" but declined to provide specific financial details.
Valerie O'Connell, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston, said that for companies with 20 or more PCs, automating updates to both operating systems and applications makes sense because of the time needed to do such tasks manually.
Eney, in the midst of installing another set of patches to fight the Blaster worm, which has infested hundreds of thousands of Windows-based computers worldwide this week, said automated patch management would definitely help in a world where "instead of taking a vitamin once a day, you get once-a-day Microsoft patches." O'Connell said that when it comes to patch management, "anybody who tries to save a couple of pennies by not automating patch management does not understand what they are dealing with."
The iCommand software will also help Carnival save time and money in constant migrations from one Microsoft operating system to another, Eney said. And it will help when updating numerous applications used ashore and afloat to handle everything from passenger credit card purchases (roughly half of Carnival's 1,200 onboard PCs serve as point-of-sale systems), to ship parts,