As well as disaster recovery, disk imaging can be used to deploy new PCs without having to install an operating system and then configure application software and custom settings every time. Snap Deploy from Acronis takes this one step further, adding tools to enable images to be pushed out to bare PCs and configure them remotely with the whole process automated, if required.

It sounds straightforward, but there's a lot in the Snap Deploy package and a number of different modules, not all of which are needed in every case.

The first requirement is to capture a disk image from a reference PC. Almost any version of Windows can be imaged including, in the latest 3.0 release, both 64-bit and 32-bit implementations.

We ran the capture program while the host PC wasn't being used but live systems can be imaged, if necessary, using a special management agent provided. Windows servers can also be imaged, although not with the Workstation product we tested. For that you'll need the more costly Snap Deploy 3.0 for Server, priced at around £49 + VAT per server.

Images are quite large so can be saved onto optical (CD/DVD) disks for manual installation or to hard disk and network shares for remote deployment. A custom Deploy Server is provided to handle the distribution, this component using multicast technology to push images out simultaneously to multiple PCs over the network.

Of course the server has to find and identify the PCs involved and they may not be bootable, so you do need to first install a Snap Deploy Agent on each one, either from a bootable CD or via a Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) server, an implementation of which is also included. Wake-on-LAN (WoL) support is also built in, enabling PCs to be powered up from standby as part of the process.

The whole operation is managed from a custom Windows console with images either deployed manually - by selecting targets from a list - or automatically, with distribution kicked off when a pre-set number of targets have been discovered. Images can be password protected for security while templates allow for customisation of settings such as the Windows workgroup or domain, Security Identifier (SID) and so on. You can even deploy to different hardware from that used to create the image, by adding the optional Universal Deploy module (£4.99 + VAT per PC).

There's quite a lot to get to grips with, but once you've worked out what's involved and how it all fits together it's not that difficult. Neither does it need much in the way of hardware to host the various components. Indeed in our tests we ran everything on an ordinary desktop PC and were impressed with how well it worked. That said, it's very much a specialist tool, of most interest to support staff inside larger organisations tasked with configuring new computers on a regular basis.

Acronis Snap Deploy provides tools to capture disk images from reference PCs, distribute them across the network and use them to provision new bare metal systems. The processes involved can be manually driven or automated via a central console and, once configured, it's reasonably easy to manage. However, it's not for the novice and is really a specialist tool for use by support staff in larger organisations.