Levanta has announced the general availability of the Intrepid M -- the world's first Linux management appliance. Through an intuitive interface, a Linux systems administrator with as little as two years of experience can use the Intrepid M to quickly deploy, rollback and migrate RPM-based Linux servers (whether running RedHat, SuSE, or Fedora distributions) from a central location -- all without the need to install the operating system or applications directly on computers.

To make it easier to use, the Intrepid M ships ready-to-go templates for a variety of workstations and servers, as well as the open source software needed to deploy them. Users can also create their own templates and add software of their choice to the repository.

Today, Linux is no longer just in the datacenter -- so the Intrepid M was also built for Linux management outside of the datacenter (for enterprise lines of business), and even in SME (small to medium sized enterprise) environments. Often, these individual lines of businesses and/or SMEs do not have a sophisticated shared storage infrastructure in place -- so the Intrepid M includes 1.4 terabytes of storage space that is used to hold software repositories and rollback information for the managed systems. Running over dual Gigabit Ethernet NICS, the Intrepid M allows line of businesses and/or SME's to manage their Linux boxes from a central location.

"The days of being forced to painfully install Linux on each machine in your environment are over," said Robert Schwartz, a Boscov's systems programmer. "Boscov's has been beta testing the Intrepid M, and the hype around this appliance is deserved. From a central repository, we can manage our Linux servers. If we need to re-provision multiple servers, we do it just once, with a few clicks. When we re-architect our POS system to run the cash registers on Linux, I would think Intrepid M will be an integral part of the design."

For years, major Linux shops such as Boscov's and Electronic Arts have used Levanta's management and provisioning software on mainframe and x86-based servers. With the release of the Intrepid M, Levanta has taken its enterprise-proven software and bundled it into a plug-and-play Linux management solution -- for enterprises, lines of business, and even SME environments.

"One of the major challenges for Linux has been the lack of sophisticated management tools to rival what's commercially available for Windows and other environments," said Audrey Rasmussen, Vice President at Enterprise Management Associates. "Levanta is addressing an underserved market with its appliance that provides management specifically for Linux systems."

"Previously, every time one of our Linux blades had a hard disk crash, it took the better part of a day for one of our admins to get a new one up and running with the proper configuration," said Arty Ecock, Manager of Enterprise Systems at City University of New York. "With the Intrepid M -- which we've been beta testing for 2 months -- disaster recovery for a failed blade is measured in minutes, not hours. We've even started removing the troublesome hard drives from the blade servers, which actually increases the reliability of the blades. We're also exploring the possibility of using the Intrepid M outside of our data center, where its speed, centralization and flexibility can act as the management hub for classroom and library environments."

"With the Novell Data Center Initiative, we are firmly committed to increasing the manageability of Linux. And with built-in support for SuSE Linux, Levanta's appliance is a timely addition to the growing roster of sophisticated Linux management tools on the market," said Carlos Montero-Luque, CTO Identity-Driven Products, Novell, Inc.

The Levanta M retails at $7,495 -- which includes 10 licenses. Additional licenses are $250 per node. Featured capabilities include:

		Provision a new server in under 5 minutes
		Migrate and reactivate a system from one hardware platform to another in minutes
		Provide a seamless transition between virtual servers and physical hardware
		Track byte-level changes with rollback
		Restore a server, even an unbootable one, to a previous, known, stable state
		Completely secure file systems, even from superuser changes