Synology NAS and Ghostcasting

So imagine a scenario where you have to prep hundreds of different machines, for different customers, with different setups, but with hundreds of potential variations of OS, applications, licensing, and you’d need these all on demand.

Back in the day (up to about 2 years ago, actually), we solved this scenario in our warehouse with a hard drive duplicator setup. We had a massive 16 drive IDE drive duplicator, a smaller 8 drive SATA duplicator, and had recently purchased a 16 drive SATA duplicator that ran it’s own embedded Windows and was quite fancy. We then augmented this deployment solution with the concept of “master drives” that we’d mark as unique, store on a shelf, and pull out to duplicate.

HDD-Duplicator

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