Easier image deployment

Phoenix Technologies ships tool for deploying disk images to PCs and laptops

Phoenix Technologies will this week ship ImageCast 6, a tool to help administrators deploy disk images to PCs and laptops.

ImageCast 6 for Enterprises supports image deployment to individual devices or multicast distribution to many systems simultaneously, and can handle thousands of clients at the same time.

According to Phoenix, the software reduces the time and resources needed to deploy images and costs firms less then rival tools that are often integrated into complex management suites.

“ImageCast has a graphical user interface (GUI) and lets admin staff distribute different images to different groups of PCs, which might be separate departments inside a large company,” said Robert Mol, senior director of marketing and distribution for Phoenix in Europe.

The key feature of the latest version is the Image Control Console Server that discovers client systems on the network and is also used to build system images for deployment. This pulls together all of the pieces needed to build an image, according to Mol. The server can hold various images up to a total of one terabyte.

Because ImageCast is designed exclusively for image creation and distribution, customers are not paying for unwanted features in a complete management suite, according to Phoenix.

“If you’re an IT manager focused on imaging, you don’t have to bother with any of the rest of those features,” Mol said.

ImageCast 6 costs £21.99 per client seat and there are discounts for volume purchases. The tool supports Windows and Linux.