Hello Ray,

You are absolutely right we have to think in TCO (Total Costs of
Ownership) terms.
On the other side, the initial investment counts to TCO as well.

Generally speaking, the prices of each product,
will determinate the market share as well as other product attributes.


I had a look at your solution, found it great,
but its price limited its suitability for my business needs
substantially.


There really are disadvantages coming aling with simple solutions
but the extent is not necessarily as high as you mentioned.

The simpler solutions like those with
NTBACKUP or PcBax - to name only two -
are automatisable to a fair extent.
Typically you will  have to create a set of boot media (floppy)
for each node, and schedule the simple tool to
backup system state to a local file,
which is backed-up by TSM in turn.
Obviously, both backup and restore procedures
will require at least one step more than OTG,
but there is neither need for repeated manual tasks
nor for usage of local media.

If I had a w2k server farm I would, no doubt, prefer to use your tool.
For not so critical business with workstations
there are even manual fresh W2K installations cheaper for me.

Facit:  it depends :)

best regards
Juraj Salak
Asamer Familienholding