Levanta (formerly LinuxCare) is shipping a second-generation “Linux management appliance.” The Intrepid X aims to help system administrators maintain highly available, highly reliable computing centers, by helping them rapidly provision, recover, roll back, or migrate Linux systems across physical and/or… virtual hardware resources.

(Click for larger view of the Levanta Intrepid X)

The Intrepid X builds on the functionality provided by Levanta's first product, the Intrepid M. Like the earlier Intrepid M, the X model targets large Linux departments and data-centers that require high scalability and reliability. According to Levanta, the device provides “on-demand functionality, disaster recovery, system portability, complete change control, unattended active/passive fail-over, and interoperability with iSCSI-over-Ethernet or Fiber Channel SANs.”

Whereas the “M” model supported popular NAS (network attached storage) devices, the “X” adds support for full-fledged SAN (storage attached network) devices. SANs eliminate the protocol overhead (FTP, CIFs, SMB, NFS, etc.) associated with NAS devices, improving performance and scalability. These traits enable the Intrepid X to serve operating systems, applications, and databases in diskless blade computing centers, among other advantages, Levanta says.

The Intrepid “X” can be used to manage Linux systems running popular RPM-based distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, Fedora Core, and Asianux, whether running on physical hardware, or on VMware virtual machines.

According to Levanta CEO Tom Jones, “The current trend in systems management is having the entire compute environment in a portable container, independent of hardware. The genesis for the Intrepid X came from customers who had already invested in virtualized storage and wanted to leverage their SANs for more than just data storage to gain increased speed, portability, manageability, and disaster recovery of the Linux operating system itself.”

Availability

The Levanta Intrepid X appears to be available now, priced (retail) at $300 per managed server, plus additional hardware appliance costs depending upon configuration.

Lots more information about Levanta's interesting corporate history, and first-generation Intrepid product, can be found in our earlier coverage of the “M” model, here.

 
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