Altiris Information

[mcsereed]

I am looking for people that use altiris and like/dislike it. I am looking for the pro's and con's. Why they decided to use this instead of SMS or other applications. Any input is appreciated.

 

[dxd]

one of the pro's of using Altiris is if you have a substancial amount of Compaq/HP hardware. Altiris partners with Compaq so it should work well in those environments. Doug
dxd_2000@yahoo.com

 

[mcsereed]

We learned about them through Dell Corp.

 

[iseriesfella]

I am not too much of a fan...could be better. They bought all of their functionality and did not develop any of it them selves...makes me worried.

 

[Chusan]

I just finished evaluating Altiris Deployment Solution and I think it's a great product. I was very impressed. Much better and easier to use that Ghost. A bit more expensive but well worth it.

 

[dgriffing]

We looked at both altiris and Ghost and chose Ghost. Altiris Deploy was a great product but much more expensive than Ghost. Ghosting XP computers reqire running sys prep but once your model is setup it works great.

 

[protos]

I am also talking to the regional manager next week
about their Client Recovery solution
for like "snapshots" of servers

anyone used or seen this ??

thanks

 

[protos]

What is their "deployment solution" product called ??

 

[mcsereed]

Protos,
their deployment solution is Deployment server. We looked into the notifcation server also. We also spent some time on different softwares to make up MSI and edit them.

 

[scottcsherman]

I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has had good or bad experence with the Altiris products for server management. What did you compare it to (Marimba, SMS, OPSWARE) and what was the outcome.

Thanks

Scott

 

[palq1]

My opinion is that Altiris is an interesting product yet patch based, that is, useful products have been bundled together and for less sofisticated users or small environments may be an interesting choice. Yet one notices the problems that derive from patching different products together.

Marimba is more powerful yet lighter on resources usage: CPU, network, etc. Due to its 100% Java based technology everything seems possible and doable with very little effort or knowledge. It's a one product dedicated to one functionality. Other functionalities they leave it to other focused software suppliers. They have unique features such as byte level differentiating, firewall trespassing and others.

SMS is Microsoft. Simple and that's it. If you won't push it it may work.

 

[mcsereed]

Scottcsherman,
We looked at SMS and I liked it. You just about get the same from The Altiris but it gives you the capability to do a little more that SMS does. I am not selling their product. My point of this was to find out what everyone else uses. Pro and cons for any of them. Some of the features that Microsoft has is good but alot of network people do not like the fact that you are patching holes in Network management software. We liked the fact the software gives us the ability to inventory the machine and the Bandwidth of its remote control feature did not cause alot of network traffic.

 

[mcsereed]

Palq1,
Thank you for your response. What do you mean by unsophisticated users?
I agree that they are bundled together. With the cost of applications out there and budgets being stressed, you want more bang for your buck. I appreciate your opinion. What made you keep away form Altiris? I do like the SMS software. By all means I am not selling Altiris software. Both need a little training to use. I was looking at what people use to implement in their networks and why they chose what they did.