2006: A Great Year for Windows IT Innovation

Outsiders might beg to differ, but the winning entries of the 2006 Windows IT Pro Innovators awards show that innovation and IT go hand in hand. This year's winning entries range from the truly cutting-edge "Windows on a Memory Stick" to solutions that automate password rotation, database restores, and medical coding; enhance collaboration and application development; and customize disk-image cloning. The three grand-prize winners and six honorable mentions confirm that innovation flourishes in the Windows IT community. (For a look at some additional noteworthy Innovators entries, see the Web-exclusive sidebar "Windows IT Pro Innovators Special Mentions," InstantDoc ID 93653.)

GRAND PRIZE
Senapathy Kalyanasundaram
Technical Leader,
Siemens Communication Software,
Bangalore, India

Years in IT: 8
Fun Facts: Has a bachelor's degree in physics and a master's in computer applications; avid fan of cricket and tennis
Notable Quote: "What I enjoy most about the IT industry is the extremely open work culture that goes with it. We get to communicate and exchange ideas with the best in the world."
Email: senapathy.k@gmail.com

A Better Sysprep
Sysprep is widely used for deploying Windows on large numbers of systems. But it doesn't always work for deploying disk images on hardware that's different from the machine on which the image was created. Senapathy Kalyanasundaram found a way to adapt Sysprep to create installation DVDs that work with a variety of hardware.

Senapathy's employer, Siemens Communication Software (SCS), provides a product for managing telecommunications switches and switching equipment; the product requires the installation of more than 30 OEM products that work with the base product. A typical installation includes 50 or more distributed, networked Windows Server 2003 servers and Windows XP clients. "We prepare basic disk images that include all the required types of drivers, then run Sysprep to strip away all machine-specific information. At clone-image restoration time, Sysprep runs, finds the appropriate drivers to use on the target system, and does an image restore to bring up the system with the OS, OEM products, and our own product," Senapathy explains. But because Sysprep works only with compatible hardware, "We needed to have as many images are there are varieties of target systems. This meant preparing, storing, and distributing numerous clone images, each running into many gigabytes, all of which the end user would have to manage."

Restoring cloned images on dissimilar hardware caused problems such as continuous restarts or blue screens. Senapathy traced the problem to discrepancies between the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and core kernel files on the imaged and target systems. "We decided to try isolating all the kernel and HAL files being used during a typical Windows setup," says Senapathy.

He discovered that only six core kernel files vary in Windows 2003 and XP, depending on the hardware. "So we extracted the compressed HAL and kernel files from the Windows installation CD-ROM and packaged them with the image for copying to the target system. We wrote a separate support application that runs in DOS mode and copies the correct and required HAL and kernel files to the target system before Windows boots."

This solution simplifies the cloning process for SCS and installations for its customers. "We reduced the number of image types from 16 to six," says Senapathy. "Additionally, we can adapt the solution to future changes. If a vendor changes a motherboard, instead of creating an entirely new image type from scratch, we can package the additional HAL and kernel files along with the support application so that they can be replaced along with the clone." Senapathy reports trimming installation times from 10 hours for a Windows 2003 server and four hours for an XP client to about two hours for each.

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