UIU Case Studies

Organization Overview

The New York Chiropractic College in upstate New York offers both undergraduate and Master’s degree programs in a variety of disciplines related to chiropractic medicine. The college’s mission is to provide leadership and academic excellence in all its degree-granting programs through a commitment to quality education and patient care, research excellence and professional service.

The process now takes a third of the time it took using the previous process.

John Vincent, Information Technology Administrator

The Situation

John Vincent, the New York Chiropractic College Information Technology Administrator, is responsible for maintaining and updating the student computer labs as well as the faculty and staff machines at the college – 500 machines in total.

The Challenge

Because Vincent had eight to 10 different models to update for each of the three areas for which he was responsible, he had to maintain nearly 30 separate master Images. He kept a model of each type of computer in his office for updating, which proved difficult to manage. Physically storing the images posed additional challenges. “It took a lot of time, at least a day or two just getting the images ready to go and then another half a day to push them out,” Vincent said. “The whole process took about three days to install, test and roll out. This meant we had to close the lab for about nine days each year. Another issue for Vincent was that he spent a significant amount of time keeping track of new hardware drivers. It is common for identical models of computers to not have the same hardware components such as processor, hard drive, controller, and network, sound and graphics cards.

The Solution

Once Vincent tried Big Bang LLC’s Universal Imaging Utility (UIU), the process became much easier. Vincent now has one dedicated machine for each department in his office containing one master image to update. He no longer needs to wheel the master machines to the lab in order to perform the updates. “I maintain one image for the student lab, one for the faculty machines and one for the staff,” explains Vincent. “The process now takes half a day to get each image ready and to roll it out, a third of the time it took using the previous process.”

The UIU also significantly frees up server storage space. He now has three Images, compared to the 30 he used to maintain. “It cut down on storage quite a bit,” Vincent continued. “We were considering purchasing another storage device for back up because of the amount of space all those images were taking up, but now we don’t have to do that. We can use storage we already have because the size and number of images we need to keep is so much smaller, thanks to the UIU.”

Another benefit Vincent has seen is that keeping drivers current is now much easier with the UIU. “Driver issues were a concern previously. Trying to keep current drivers for all the models we had here was a challenge. Now we just use the UIU and it keeps track of that information for us. We don’t have to worry about having the right drivers or storing them all for all the equipment and peripherals we have. I now rely solely on the UIU to complete this task.

Vincent is now thinking about conducting regularly scheduled updates to the faculty and staff machines because of the success he’s experienced using the UIU for the student computer labs. “UIU makes it so much easier that I’m considering proactively updating the other machines to keep them fresh and clean. Because they run faster when freshly imaged, this might also cut down on support calls, saving even more time.”

We don’t have to worry about having the right drivers...I now rely solely on the UIU.

John Vincent, Information Technology Administrator

The UIU has been so beneficial to the college that Vincent was able to abandon his plans to hire a new position within his department. “We were ready to hire a person just to take care of the desktop administration,” explained Vincent. “It had become such a burden and took a back seat to the more critical work that had to be done. It was hard for me to keep up with the administrative duties, because of my network and server responsibilities. Now that I’ve seen how easy UIU is to use, I don’t feel I need to hire another person, which really pleases management because we’re saving money.” “UIU has been a great product for us,” Vincent says. “It definitely meets all my needs. It’s been fantastic.”