Levanta announced the release of version 4.2 of its award-winning Intrepid M Linux management appliance, to be demonstrated at the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco. Version 4.2 of the Intrepid M will open up a wider range of storage environments for Levanta customers, with new built-in support for NetApp and OnStor.

With the additional external storage support, the Intrepid M 4.2 provides increased redundancy and fail-over options -- and makes it possible to host mission critical data on storage systems on the back-end, while running cheap, off-the-shelf commodity Linux boxes on the front end.

"The preferred approach to systems management is shifting to the notion of having the IP in a portable container, independent of commodity hardware," said David Dennis, Director of Marketing and Products at Levanta. "The goal is decoupling the content and data from the machine that it's running on, and organizations are increasingly keeping their valuable content on the back end -- in storage systems -- rather than on the servers themselves. By integrating support for multiple storage systems into the Intrepid M product line, Levanta is enabling a new degree of portability into Linux management, and making it much easier for customers to manage both the physical and virtual world."

Levanta's Intrepid M is the first appliance to combine data virtualization with network provisioning -- delivering on demand functionality in a Linux systems management solution that's as accessible to the mid-market as it is to the enterprise. Winner of the "Most Innovative Hardware Solution" from LinuxWorld, and recently named a finalist in eWeek's "Excellence Awards," the Intrepid M appliance greatly simplifies common Linux management scenarios (from server provisioning, to application deployment, to disaster recovery and change control).

The Intrepid M 4.2 version also includes new enhancements to the graphic user interface (GUI), and support for additional Linux distributions (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4).