Cloning Technology

INTRODUCTION TO CLONING
Making virtually identical instances of the same computer configuration – “cloning” is an important requirement in enterprise environments. With cloning, complex system configurations and applications that take hours or even days to finalize can be duplicated across multiple machines, saving countless hours of tedious effort. Users can transfer all the personality of their current machine to a larger hard drive, or—with the latest products—to an entirely new PC. In public use environments, computers can be reimaged regularly, bringing the systems back to “pristine” configurations and removing any traces of personally identifiable information or malware.

A SHORT HISTORY OF CLONING
As recently as the early 90’s, if an IT department wanted to deploy a new workstation or server, there was no easy way to duplicate an existing system or configuration - it had to be built from scratch. Computer manufacturers pioneered the use of disk copying machines, but these devices were ignorant of the difference between used and un-used space on disks. The entire structure was copied, so the disks had to have identical drive geometry and the target disk had to be the same size or larger than the source. Any free space on larger replacement disks was wasted.

Windows 95 and the appearance of the File Allocation Table 32 (FAT32) in the mid 1990s made things even more complicated. Windows was huge compared to its predecessors, and copy programs were not up to the task. Simple file copy does not work well as computer operating systems like Windows require boot files, usually invisible, that have to be in a specific location on the disk to work. The answer seemed to be in the disks partitions rather than the files they contained.

In 1996, Binary Research Ltd., of Auckland, New Zealand came to the rescue with Ghost. General Hardware-Oriented Transfer (GHOST) not only understood how to deal with disk partitions intelligently, but it could even copy other “foreign” operating systems using a brute-force sector-by-sector approach. Ghost even added NTFS support for Microsoft’s Windows NT (“New Technology”) operating system , which also required a companion program – Ghost Walker - to generate the Security Identifiers (SIDs) that make each Microsoft NT instance unique.
With the explosion of the enterprise PC market, PC cloning technologies grew in demand. Ghost and its competitors added more and more features and refinement. Ultimately Ghost and several competitors were bought by Symantec, which remains one of the leaders in the cloning field to this day.

THE CLONING INDUSTRY TODAY
The original cloning machines haven’t gone away, they have just become more sophisticated. Logicube makes a half dozen “smart” disk cloners that will handle from two to twelve IDE, EIDE, UDMA or SATA drives at a time, all managed from a master console. Law enforcement authorities use handheld hardware and forensic cloning software like EnCase to make evidence-quality copies of a suspect’s hard drive.

Ghost is still around--version 14 can image a PC’s entire hard drive or specific directories to an FTP site, network attached storage, or even turn it into a virtual machine instance. Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery and Acronis Backup & Recovery offer added flexibility. Symantec’s Altiris offers an all-in-one imaging and patching platform. Very importantly, one of the original limitations of Ghost and its brethren – system images being inexorably tied to the exact computer hardware configuration they were made from – has been solved.  The personality and installed software on a PC or server can now be transferred to a whole new machine with a completely different hardware configuration. This hardware independence dramatically reduces the time to complete installations and hardware upgrades.

CLONING DECISIONS
As a business owner or IT manager, you should ask yourself these questions as you look at cloning technologies for your organization:

• How many machines am I replacing/deploying, and will I be able to replace many machines with homogeneous (identical) hardware? (The time to build images is not insignificant, and may not be worth it for small numbers of machines.)
• Do I have a detailed strategy for rolling out cloned desktops, including user interaction, labor hour estimates, and procedures for post-replacement follow-up?
• Don’t forget the old computers! Have I thought about the process and associated costs of transferring any necessary data from old computers and properly disposing of the old hardware?