LinMin Goes Green with "Fire and Forget" Provisioning

By Shamila Janakiraman

TMCnet Contributor

LinMin announced some enhancements to its LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP). LBMP 5.1 has new features which will enable customers reduce energy consumption and labor costs. LBMP will now support 50 different versions and architectures of Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS and Asianux Linux, and versions of Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows.

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning enables IT organizations to temporarily decommission systems for bringing down energy consumption and controlling the carbon footprint. LinMin’s rules-based bare metal installation of Linux and Windows operating systems offers a new combination. It also offers bare metal imaging for Linux which blends two different and complementary technologies accessed through one graphical user interface.

The solution allows organizations to capture Linux disk snapshots of old systems which consume more power. This can be used as a back up for safe keeping. Operating systems and application stacks can be deployed on new and energy efficient hardware. The older systems can be reprovisioned, repurposed and re-imaged anytime during peak demand periods or can be kept as cold standby backup systems.

LinMin has added business rules for IT teams to enable support for more systems at the same time controlling headcount. “Fire and Forget” Provisioning offers IT professionals control over each system. Rules like “always provision”, “never provision”, “provision only once then never provision”, “boot to local disk”, “capture disk image” and “restore disk image” are system activities which can be started and changed any time easily. IT professionals can deterministically install and configure operating systems and applications. They can also identify network security and other settings.

“Razor Servers and LinMin worked closely together to augment LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning with capabilities ideally suited to web hosting companies and IT organizations with heterogeneous data centers and limited personnel,” said Matt Kelly, CEO of Razor Servers, a Philadelphia-based dedicated hosting company.

“With LinMin’s new ‘fire and forget’ provisioning business rules, we reduce labor costs, human error and elapsed time in getting new Linux and Windows servers online,” added Kelly.

Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin explained that with skyrocketing energy prices and shrinking IT budgets, reducing expenses is more important than ever. LinMin helps customers contain or reduce these costs. LBMP 5.1 includes a re-designed user interface and ‘fire and forget’ which will complement easy provisioning capabilities and support for many new Linux distributions.

The built-in support for versions of Linux is either entering beta or completed like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Fedora 9, Novell (News - Alert) SLES 10 SP2 and even SLES 11, enabling customers to launch more energy-efficient operating systems on newer, greener hardware.

LinMin is systems management-agnostic as it can install third party management agents then automatically pass control of freshly provisioned or re-purposed systems over to the customer’s systems management infrastructure said Gharda.

Shamila Janakiraman is a TMCnet Contributing Editor.

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