(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Hosting automation software provider LinMin (www.linmin.com) has announced the release of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning version 5.5, adding Provisioning Rollback capabilities. A combination of bare metal provisioning and bare metal imaging technologies for Linux and Windows, Provisioning Rollback provides a virtual “undo” button for the provisioning process.
By definition, bare-metal operations destroy all prior contents of systems, however, LinMin’s new capability makes it easy to automatically capture a system’s disk image, which can be used to undo the provisioning event and roll a system back to its fully-operational known-good state. This is especially useful when an operating system deployment was done in error, performed explicitly to shift computing resources in near-real time during peak demand, or to test new configurations.
“Hosting companies and system builders are finding ways of leveraging the combination of bare metal provisioning and bare metal imaging in ways we never even thought of,” LinMin chief executive officer and founder Laurent Gharda said in a statement. “In introducing Provisioning Rollback, or what we call the ‘oops’ button, we’ve automated what customers were already doing manually using LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Our customers really deserve the credit.”
Also, release 5.5 introduces the provisioning of Debian systems, letting LinMin users in hosting and corporate data centers quickly deliver systems running Debian 4 and 5 in addition to all major versions of Windows and Linux, as well as new Linux distributions from Red Hat, Novell, Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu. After LinMin has been integrated into hosting control panels using the application programming interface, dedicated server end customers can remotely re-purpose systems to over 100 different versions and architectures of Linux and Windows without involving hosting company staff.
Matteo Berlonghi, chief technology officer of Italian hosting provider SeFlow, said that using LinMin to provision its physical infrastructure has already enabled SeFlow to grow quickly and the new changes will offer even more advantages. “[N]ow that LinMin provisions Debian, we’ve introduced customer-initiated self-service bare metal server provisioning for all major versions of Linux and Windows,” Berlonghi said in a statement. “By empowering our dedicated server customers to re-purpose their systems at will, quality of service gets even higher without involving SeFlow team members.”
A free trial of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.5 is available for Linux and Windows. The full version is available for $999 for up to 100 systems, $1,999 for up to 250 systems, $3,499 for up to 500 systems, $5,999 for up to 1,000 systems and $9,999 for up to 2000 systems.
