UIU Case Studies

The New York Blood Center

For more than 40 years, the New York Blood Center (NYBC) has provided their community with transfusion products and services, leading-edge research, technological and medical care innovation, and education in the field of transfusion medicine. In addition, the NYBC provides life-saving blood products and services to almost 200 hospitals in New York and New Jersey every day. In order to accomplish these substantial humanitarian feats and manage the data and infrastructure behind them, the NYBC relies on Computer Science Corporation (CSC) to maintain and operate their IT systems. CSC is a fortune 200 company with over ninety-five thousand employees on five different continents. CSC is easily one of the world’s largest and most respected providers of information technology, infrastucture systems, enterprise solutions and managed network solutions.

The Issue

Shaun Miller and the rest of the MIS team for CSC at the NYBC, set out to fix the Blood Center‘s main IT problem, which was their lack of a standardized hard drive image. With over 500 PCs comprised of 15-16 different makes and models, they were managing well over a dozen images. With so many different images, keeping track of which images went with certain models, and whether or those images were up-to-date presented a significant challenge and required a considerable amount of time and effort.

We were immediately able to take dissimilar hardware and simplify the imaging process down to one image.

Shaun Miller, MIS

Organizations with so many images face time-consuming difficulties when PCs need to be re-imaged. The appropriate image needs to be obtained to correspond with the PC(s) in question. Very often the image is not updated, and everything from new policies, to security, to Windows updates, needs to take place before the image can be deployed. If there are any driver updates required, or any hardware components have been replaced, the process takes even longer.

If an image cannot be found for a particular PC, or if the PC is new and an image was never created, then building a compatible image from scratch and testing and deploying it can take several days. This process must be completed for every existing and new PC in order for an organization to maintain consistency and best practices.

The Solution

Shaun was introduced to the Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) by a colleague who had discovered the UIU at an IT Trade Show. The Universal Imaging Utility is the only software application able to create a ONE hardware-independent Windows hard drive image that can be easily deployed to any laptop or desktop regardless of manufacturer. When CSC incorporated the UIU at the Blood Center, Shaun and the rest of the MIS team saw immediate results. “We were able to implement the UIU into the Blood Center IT framework and were immediately able to take dissimilar hardware and simplify the imaging process down to one image.”

The UIU has reduced imaging time significantly. Less than a quarter of the time it took before.

Shaun Miller, MIS

The UIU contains a fully vetted and updated driver database of over 32,000 plug-and-play IDs, the ability to detect different HAL types, and the programmatic functionality to work with Windows prior to mini-setup to ensure that anything that might prevent cross-platform deployment is handled.