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Levanta Inc. is bringing its mainframe server management expertise into the Intel space.
The San Francisco company, formerly known as Linuxcare Inc., on Monday unveiled Levanta Release 3 for PC Servers, a platform designed to help enterprises manage their scale-out data centers.
Levanta rolled out the first version of its software, Levanta for zSeries, targeted at IBMs mainframe systems in 2002. The latest version is targeting servers powered by Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc. processors and running Linux, said CEO Akmal Khan.
The goal is to ease the complexity and management issues inherent in a scale-out environment, Khan said. Making the move from a scale-up architecture “brings a lot of management complexity and risk with it. Youve reduced the cost by bringing in standard hardware and software, but now you have to manage thousands of [servers],” he said.
Enterprises increasingly are turning to the combination of a scale-out architecture and Linux as a way of reducing IT spending, he said.
With Levanta, users are able to quickly order, provision, deploy and boot servers within two minutes, Khan said. The software also supports virtual servers, and can transition quickly between virtual and physical machines.
In addition, the software—through Levantas Smart Mirror and Repository technologies—allows for what Khan called authoritative control of the systems, such as enabling enterprises to roll back to previous versions of files, servers, clusters or entire data centers. It also enables users to recover a server that is unable to boot, store previous versions of files, and dynamically activate or hibernate servers based on business needs, he said.