Levanta's Linux Management Appliance Wins Respect of Fujitsu Siemens Computers' Software Development Team

Business Wire, April 11, 2006

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- The Leading European IT Vendor Tests Intrepid M Appliance in Rigorous Software Development Environment for Next-Generation Data Center Solutions

Levanta, the leader in Linux management, today announced that leading IT solutions provider Fujitsu Siemens Computers' core software team in Sunnyvale test-drove the Intrepid M Linux management appliance to support the rigors of their development cycle. As Fujitsu Siemens Computers developers build innovative new data center solutions on top of the Linux platform, the Intrepid M proves the ability to greatly simplify the provisioning, change management and storage requirements of the underlying Linux hardware.

"Because of the data virtualization and network provisioning capabilities of the Intrepid M, we were able to reduce the overhead and shorten the time required for our automated test cycles," said Ron Sheen, Vice President, Engineering at the American subsidiary of Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "The Intrepid's rollback and image management capabilities allow for a degree of flexibility that we would not have been able to achieve with other tools. The performance of the Intrepid M has been remarkable, especially considering the sub-$10k price tag of the appliance."

In the process of evaluating the Intrepid M management appliance for possible joint solutions and partnership efforts with Levanta, Fujitsu Siemens Computers stood the appliance up to the ultimate battleground: their own internal software development cycle. Software development and quality assurance cycles require rapid provisioning of images, reliable change management, and frequent roll-backs to previous known states.

The Intrepid M's fast provisioning scheme allowed Fujitsu Siemens Computers' developers to create new environments -- from development to testing to staging -- in minutes. The management appliance's ability to easily bind and unbind software stacks to hardware allowed Fujitsu Siemens developers to easily turn one or two physical machines into a variety of virtual machines. This flexibility to "swap out" the Linux environment in a matter of minutes allowed Fujitsu Siemens Computers to maximize human development resources, and to optimize hardware performance.

The Intrepid M's ability to perform checkpoints in a fast, lightweight manner also meant that they can be taken frequently -- and any changes made by developers were done so with a "safety net."

"In software development, you can't overstate the value of being able to simply restore a previously known state with a simple click," said Adam Fineberg, VP of Engineering at Levanta. "This ensures that an errant change can be rolled back simply and easily -- from a few individual files, or the entire system -- rather than having to rebuild from scratch."

With a role-based permissions scheme, the Intrepid M appliance also allowed Fujitsu Siemens Computers developers to test, manipulate, and configure only the machines they've been assigned to -- ensuring that developers' work didn't collide.

About Levanta

Levanta is a leader in Linux management and data virtualization. Levanta's unique technology marries change control with data virtualization, delivering dramatically faster and more flexible control of Linux on commodity hardware, racks, blades, boxes, virtual machines, and even mainframes. Levanta's customers include industry leaders in financial services, entertainment, government, retail and telecommunications. Levanta has partnerships with IBM, HP, Novell, and Red Hat. A private company, Levanta is headquartered in San Mateo and can be found on the Web at http://www.levanta.com.