SMS Companion v3 - Advanced Scheduling and Power Management for SMS / SCCM
Scheduling is a business-critical function. SMS Companion is the only product that
controls the scheduling of SMS Actions to occur outside of regular work hours regardless
of the power state of the machine.
Leaving your desktops on 24/7 to patch and distribute software? SMS Companion
can save a company with 4500 computers over
$80,000.00 - $100,000 a year in energy costs.
It's the real deal. SCCM Expert and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) think Companion can
help save you money and conserve energy.
Read how E.ON UK, a power and gas supplier to 4.9 million homes in the UK,
saved £140,000 in their first year of use.
See the full story here.
Core Functionalities
Wake-on-LAN
Use Wake-on-LAN technology to eliminate employee downtime and interference: Provide
SMS services outside working hours.
All operations such as software distribution, hardware inventory, software inventory,
and software metering can be scheduled to happen outside regular work hours, regardless
of the current state of the affected systems (on/off status, unsaved documents,
currently running processes). User interruptions no longer occur and user interference
in executing administrative functions is removed.
Client Power State Management
Control the power state of your SMS clients on a schedule
Reduce energy consumption and secure your workstations after hours. No need to leave
your computers powered on for off hours software distribution as SMS Companion will
wake computers as required and return them to their original power state only when
they complete their SMS operation.
Client Power Usage and Reporting
View detailed usage reports on computer energy use. Companion tracks computer uptime
and correlates energy consumption, cost, and type to deliver precise measurements
for power consumption and savings.
Control the power state of your SMS clients on a schedule
Reduce energy consumption and secure your workstations after hours. No need to leave
your computers powered on for off hours software distribution as SMS Companion will
wake computers as required and return them to their original power state only when
they complete their SMS operation.
Dynamic Last Machine on Subnet (DLMS)
High availability peer-to-peer WOL functionality
DLMS overcomes the conflict between shutting down computers to save energy and having
an available client to relay Magic Packets to perform peer to peer Wake on LAN when
subnet broadcasting is not used. When DLMS is enabled during the client install
the Companion clients on each respective subnet will ensure that another machine
is woken if the last computer is shutdown. This will even work when all machines
are simultaneously shut down.
Wake-on-Schedule EXCLUSIVE TO SMS COMPANION
Use Wake-on-Schedule to support clients that do not support or are not configured
for Wake-on-LAN
Wake-on-Schedule brings a remote computer to an operational state when in hibernation
or standby. You no longer need to manually enable BIOS or Windows settings to gain
WOL-like functionality. The only requirements are that the client receive the Advertisement
schedule and be in a hibernated or standby state, easily achievable using the SMS
Companion client shutdown overlay.
Service Windows EXCLUSIVE TO SMS COMPANION
Restrict SMS actions from occurring during specific time windows
SMS Companion allows you to configure service windows for SMS inventory and software
distribution. You can prevent software distribution from occurring during business
hours or certain times of day globally or per advertisement. Service windows allow
SMS to conform to service level agreements to reduce or eliminate user or system
interruptions.
Integrated Reporting EXCLUSIVE TO SMS COMPANION
Report on Companion status directly from SMS Web Reports
SMS Companion creates 30 SMS Web reports to report on SMS Companion actions. Existing
web reports can be easily extended to display WOL results. Report on client power
consumption, energy costs, and client power events.
Instant Actions EXCLUSIVE TO SMS COMPANION
Invoke SMS client actions across entire collections
SMS Companion can run Hardware Inventory, Machine Policy Evaluation and other SMS
client functions immediately across thousands of machines simultaneously using integrated
Wake on LAN and a multithreaded engine. You no longer require slow remote WMI and
RPC calls or security holes to complete these operations.
Unattended Logoff Commands
Control logoff behavior at shutdown
Execute client side logic to determine whether a machine should be shutdown. Use
simple scripting to cancel a shutdown or perform another function such as hibernate.
Run UI scripts to save client data before shutting down.
Load Balancing EXCLUSIVE TO SMS COMPANION
- Drastically reduce peak network and SMS server load.
- Improve site salability and site performance.
- Reduce your infrastructure requirements.
Eliminate the tendency of SMS clients to simultaneously access site resources. SMS
Companion allows perfectly orchestrated, administrator-controlled
behavior. Clients utilize site resources in a predictable, resource-leveled
fashion, under the absolute control of utilization policy defined by the administrator.
This applies to software distribution, hardware inventory, software inventory and
software metering.
Sites of any size benefit greatly:
- Small installations — where one server performs all SMS roles and may host the Exchange
Server and domain controller — reduce the peak demand on the server.
- Large installations, where SMS roles may span several dedicated servers, typically
benefit most from reduced peak network load.
Perform any SMS action instantly —
throughout any Collection.
The usual pattern of an SMS operation is to initiate an action and wait several
hours or days for it to finish. With SMS Companion, administrators can achieve real-time
results for a wide range of actions over a large number of clients.
An administrator can:
- Select one or more software distributions and push immediately to all targeted clients;
- Target one or more collections and perform one or more instant client actions on
all the machines;
- Select a single machine and have specific instant client actions performed on that
machine alone.
By combining the powerful load balancing and instant client actions you can rethink
your deployment scenarios:
TASK 1: Create an advertisement and set to load balance
over a 3-hour period.
TASK 2: Use instant client actions against a collection
to wake up and check for new advertisements.
RESULT: All targeted machines wake up, check for advertisements,
and load balance their requests to the DP over a 3 hour period.
Within 3 hours, all your clients have executed the program without over utilizing
your SMS infrastructure.
With new instant actions, you can use SMS to secure your environment. SMS Companion
allows instant system shutdown, instant remote user logoff, instant computer locking.
EXAMPLE: A bank administrator can remotely lock a collection
of all sensitive computers at closing time.
EXAMPLE: At the first sign of a virus outbreak an administrator
can create a collection of all infected machines and perform a remote shutdown.
These are just a few of the critical tasks SMS Companion handles with ease. Find
out more about how SMS Companion can save you time and money.
Request a demo today.
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