August 13, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – LinMin (http://www.linmin.com), provider of the award-winning LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning™ solution, today unveiled Release 5.2, featuring a new Application Programming Interface (API), single-command installation, numerous feature enhancements and support for the provisioning and imaging of additional platforms. The API is designed to allow customers and partners to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning into environments that presently cannot do bare metal provisioning of Microsoft Windows®, Red Hat®, Novell®, Ubuntu®, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines.
LinMin customers requested the API for different business reasons but with common objectives: automation, cost reduction, quality and business agility. Web hosting and dedicated server hosting companies want their customer signup and billing software to automatically trigger the provisioning of systems with the customer’s choice of operating system and applications. Corporate data center customers need a way to enable their load balancing, monitoring, discovery/availability or systems management software to quickly repurpose available systems. Providers of Cloud Computing environments, be they public, virtual public or private, need to automate the provisioning of the “commodity hardware infrastructure layer” and its subsequent repurposing for optimized demand elasticity. Even non-IT software can trigger the deployment of new systems or the repurposing of existing ones. For example, Human Resources information systems can now instruct LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning to prepare office or technical desktops and laptops for new employees.
“IPNetZone has come to rely on LinMin for both the provisioning and imaging of servers in our various co-location sites,” said James Karimi, CTO of IPNetZone, a New York-based provider of security, monitoring and hosting services. “LinMin’s new API will enable us to offer even better responsiveness to customer requests for additional and/or differently-configured Linux and Windows servers.”
“Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone product didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Now, with the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. “LinMin’s ability to install applications and management agents during the provisioning process is even more valuable with the API, bringing a closed loop process to customers’ existing environments: automatically select an appropriate and available physical or virtual system, invoke the LinMin API, and after the system is provisioned, these agents identify themselves to their respective management, monitoring, policy enforcement, availability, compliance and other applications that then take control of the system. This is IT application integration at its best”
The API offers both a graphical user interface that can be integrated into other Web-based applications, and a traditional programmatic interface, giving customers maximum flexibility. The example GUI can also be used as a “teaching mechanism” with the option to view in real time the API-compliant commands that get issued to and the responses received from the LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning server. This enables software developers to quickly develop API calls with real-time debugging, reducing implementation times.
Once integrated with LinMin via the API, third party, internally-developed or open source software can create, maintain and delete system provisioning roles (e.g., Red Hat application server, Novell SLES database server, Windows Web server or Ubuntu office desktop) and assign them to specific physical systems or virtual machines, along with pre-determined networking and security settings based on business rules unique to each customer.
LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 also introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, then downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes. LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1 release. LinMin provisions over 50 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows.
LinMin provides software that remotely provisions and images Linux and Windows on servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP) is the industry’s only truly affordable system provisioning and imaging solution that can be implemented by IT organizations of any size with very limited budgets. LinMin is based in Redwood City, Calif. with development and QA offices in Menlo Park and San Rafael, California, USA.
