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Numerous studies conducted by IDC have found that total cost of ownership (TCO) is highly dependent upon the long-term management costs associated with client and server systems.

The use of sophisticated management tools can dramatically reduce the dependence upon IT staff to deploy, configure, maintain, and upgrade operating systems and application portfolios. With staff costs ranking as the single largest element in TCO models for supporting common business workloads, it stands to reason that investments in automating systems management can have a dramatic impact on ongoing operational costs.

One of the most challenging and costly functions performed by IT staff today is the deployment of an operating system to new or existing client computers. Currently, organisations spend a great deal of time and expense planning, designing, and rolling out the latest version of the operating system. Often this process is done manually, requiring a help desk professional to physically visit each computer.

Automate installations

Remote Installation Service (RIS) is a feature that was first included in Microsoft's Windows 2000 server. It allows network administrators to install the Windows operating system to any number of client computers at one time from a centralised location.

It can be used to:

Configure new computers out of the box

Restore the operating system on a computer that has failed

When the client computer is connected to the server through a local area network, the computer's hardware will find the RIS server and request a copy of the operating system.

The network administrator can use the RISrep imaging option to copy several versions, or images, of a company's desktop configuration to the server so that if a request is made, the server can issue an "image" for a particular computer or user.