LinMin announced the availability of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP). LBMP can remotely provision (natively install and configure Linux and customer-specified applications) as well as image (snapshot and rollback entire systems for disaster recovery and clone systems for mass deployment) servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LBMP enables systems to be rapidly deployed, repurposed and recovered. LinMin delivered the successful Beta version of the product to customers several weeks ago.

“I installed LBMP in just a few minutes, and immediately started using it to provision my Linux servers and blades," said Brian McArthur, Regional Director for Advantage Professionals. "LBMP is a great system provisioning and imaging solution that saves me incredible amounts of time while increasing consistency between systems. LBMP paid for itself in less than two weeks.”

“LinMin ships a commercial grade product at unheard-of prices. This allows corporate and departmental IT organizations, web hosting and SaaS companies, academic and research institutions, system builders, QA labs and open source professionals with very limited budgets to benefit from advanced IT automation solutions,” said Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin. “One of the old ways of acquiring IT tools was to spend months defining requirements and evaluating products priced from $10,000 to $200,000, make a business case to the CIO and then spend weeks or months implementing the solution. The other way was for experts to assemble open source components and customize them to work in a specific environment with considerable IT development and maintenance costs. Now you can simply buy LBMP with a credit card, expense it and become productive the same day, at a fraction of the cost. ‘Affordable and simple to use’ are the cornerstone principles for LBMP and future LinMin products.”

Based on proprietary Linux systems management intellectual property acquired by LinMin, LBMP is the enhanced fifth generation of a provisioning solution used by leading companies for several years. Installation and operation have been simplified. LBMP also supports all of the most popular versions of Linux. A pre-release edition supporting the provisioning of Windows Server products for mixed Linux/Windows environments is also included in the current shipping product.

“LBMP is complementary to existing commercial and open source systems management solutions that perform patch updating, monitoring, asset management and other necessary functions,” added Laurent Gharda. “What has been lacking until now is a low-priced, framework-independent bare metal provisioning solution that co-exists with other systems management tools. LBMP automates the installation and configuration of the operating system, applications and management agents, then passes control of the newly provisioned or re-purposed system to the customer’s existing systems management infrastructure, be it commercially-supplied, open source or entirely manual.”