Application-Deployment Tools

Two of the most complex and costly challenges facing today's IT departments are deploying and managing desktop applications over distributed networks. Organizations struggle through a new application rollout, only to be blindsided by the all-consuming task of maintaining and supporting the application after deployment. Indeed, the rapid adoption of distributed computing has overwhelmed many IT departments that don't possess the staffing or tools required to support the needs of their increasingly complex and dispersed clients.

This dilemma has prompted industrywide analysis of the costs of owning and supporting PCs. The terms total cost of ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) are now familiar to managers, who are still shocked that the cumulative annual cost for a single PC can be thousands of dollars beyond its initial purchase price. Because managing desktop applications directly or indirectly makes up a significant portion of that annual expense, many organizations are keenly interested in tools that streamline and centralize application deployment and management.

Many IT shops—weary of numerous, disparate management utilities that are rarely interoperable and that fragment the skills of IT staffs—have been attracted to large framework solutions from vendors such as Computer Associates (CA), Tivoli Systems, and BMC Software. Other shops are finding that framework solutions can be too expensive or complex or that they compromise on important features available in smaller, best-of-breed products.

My original goal was to review products that perform all aspects of application deployment and management. Thus, I tried to weed out single-purpose products such as cloning or packaging tools. I also excluded products such as framework solutions and Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) whose functionality extends into asset management and Help desk support. I quickly discovered, however, that the lines separating product categories have blurred and many products are extending their capabilities. For example, Lanovation's PictureTaker had been strictly a packager, but the recent 4.0 release includes deployment capabilities. Symantec purchased 20/20 Software's AutoInstall to add packaging and deployment capabilities to the recent version of Symantec's cloning utility, Norton Ghost 6.5 Enterprise Edition. (For a review of AutoInstall, see "AutoInstall 1.17," December 1999. For a comparative review of cloning utilities, see Ed Roth, "Disk-Imaging Solutions," May 2001.) Several of the products I acquired for this feature have some functionality that extends beyond application deployment and management. I mention the additional features in the course of this review.

For this feature, I chose five products as a representative sample of the technology and methods available from more than a dozen vendors that provide application deployment and management solutions. (Table 1, page 70, lists eight products not included in this review.) I ran the chosen five products in the Windows 2000 Magazine Lab and assessed their features. I start with a brief introduction to each product, then delve more deeply into a comparison of all the products' packaging, distribution, and management features.

Castanet 4.6
Marimba's Castanet 4.6 is a client/server-based application deployment and management product designed for large enterprises. Until recently, Marimba sold Castanet as a family of separately licensed suites. Now, Marimba bundles the Infrastructure, Management, and Production suites together to let you package, deliver, and update applications. The separately licensed Subscription Suite lets you implement policies. The Inventory Suite, also licensed separately, lets you collect hardware and software inventory details in an Oracle, Sybase, or Microsoft SQL Server database.

Castanet is a robust, multifaceted solution whose price tag is markedly higher than that of the other solutions I looked at. However, Castanet might be worth every penny for an organization that can exploit the full breadth of its functionality.

Castanet terminology follows a television theme. A Castanet deployment consists of a server component called a Transmitter, which uses HTTP to communicate with clients called Tuners. These components work together to deploy, update, and manage applications. Castanet identifies each application as a separate Channel. Figure 1 shows Castanet's Transmitter Administrator with the Channels this Transmitter provides.

For deployments in distributed environments, Castanet provides Repeaters and Proxies as remote distribution points for the source packages. Repeaters are intelligent distribution points ideally suited for unreliable or intermittent WAN links. Proxies are simple caching servers that act as dispersed distribution points and let you isolate network traffic. Castanet Mirrors act as redundant Transmitters for failover and load balancing in large environments. You administer Castanet through a proprietary Java-based console. You can deploy this console on any Tuner to provide multiple points of administration. Figure 2 shows a sample Castanet deployment with the various components.

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