Playing with a KACE2000.
I originally came across KACE at one of the Sydney geek shows (might have been CES I can't remember) years ago and at the time I remember thinking, thats a neat idea, but its a bit small for what I am doing at the moment.
Well, a while back they got bought by Dell and since then they have made leaps and bounds. Its still definately for the smaller side of the small/medium business market as multiple sites and replication etc is a bit more cumbersome than the big boys toys like SC or Altiris but I have to say its fast, really fast in fact and as long as you aren't doing some of the more complicated large enterprise stuff it works pretty well, and it handles Apple Macs even if it can't do bootcamp - yet
The K2000 and the K1000 (virtual appliance or physical box) are the two things I have been playing with The K2000 is the OSD side of things and the K1000 is the 'everything else' side of things, patching, software deployment, inventory etc etc.
The thing that really sets it apart in my opinion is its seemless integration into things like AppDeploy and a number of other sites and tools, so even if you dont know how to package, its not a problem, the KACE will handle a chunk of the work for a lot of the well known packages for you. Given the target audience of these boxes is likely to be a jack-of-all-trades sysadmin at a smaller shop or a consultant who will have to hand it over to IT staff who probably aren't experienced packagers or systems managment people this capability is invaluable.
The K1000 is very quick at software deployments too, you have to really know what you are doing with SCCM to get it to run as fast and update as quickly as the K1000 does out of the box.
The Kn000's are a FreeBSD based setup and can be downloaded for a 30 day trial in ovf flavour for importing into the hypervisor of your choice so why not give it a whirl. You can download it from http://www.dell.com/kace
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